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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378662">Know Your Exits</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CannibalisticDuck/pseuds/CannibalisticDuck'>CannibalisticDuck</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>1917 (Movie 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>1917 but make it magic, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Gryffindor, M/M, Ravenclaw, Tags Are Hard, obligatory harry potter au, send the kids to war ig</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 14:22:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>25,173</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378662</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CannibalisticDuck/pseuds/CannibalisticDuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a war coming, and Tom Blake can't stop looking at Will Schofield.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joseph Blake &amp; Tom Blake, Tom Blake &amp; William Schofield, Tom Blake/William Schofield</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>110</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year prefect of Ravenclaw, was beautiful.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year prefect of Gryffindor, had known this since his first year at Hogwarts.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Those first few weeks were an overwhelming blur of excitement and anxiousness.  Navigating the staircase was as much of a challenge as scrambling to make friends of his housemates. Tom quickly found that he was best suited to make friends through his storytelling. Him and Joe had gotten up to some great mischief back in Essex, and his dormmates didn’t need to know if he embellished a few details, so long as he kept them laughing.</p><p>Tom had eventually settled into the rhythms of Hogwarts. He told increasingly entertaining stories as he got to know his fellow Gryffindors’ preferred humor; he excelled at Astronomy and struggled in Herbology; and his voice went hoarse after contrasting a nasty cold watching the first quidditch match of the year.</p><p>(Dementors flooded the pitch, but Tom suspected he could eventually forget that blood-curdling fear and use it as a punchline in a story years from now.)</p><p>Tom was happy at Hogwarts. Happy with his new bed, with his new friends, with the limitless Ribena at breakfast, lunch and supper. But he still considered Joe his best friend and spent every meal tucked next to his big brother, laughing amongst the friends Joe wrote home about so often that Tom couldn’t help but admire them as storybook heroes.</p><p>They took to him well, always commenting how Tom looked like Joe, but younger. Slowly, the knot in Tom’s chest loosened. He didn’t always have to be a storyteller filling awkward silences with friendly chatter. He could comfortably assume the role of Joe’s younger brother and happily watch well-choreographed banter fill the inevitable silences of mealtime, just as he’d always had, and he was glad.</p><p>Tom learned to hate Hogsmeade weekends.</p><p>When Joe and his mates were off for their first Hogsmeade visit of the year, Tom came to the icy realization that his peers had started pairing off into their own groups without him. He hopped from group to group with warm reception, despite their newly minted friendships, telling stories all the way.</p><p>He stuck especially close to Joe that night in the Common Room and soaked in the stories of Butterbeer and ghosts and felt an awful pang of loneliness, even as Joe intermittently ruffled his hair from his perch on the armchair.</p><p>The weekend came to an end, classes resumed, and Tom fell back into the familiar rhythm of being Joe Blake’s younger brother and wrote a happy letter to their mother.</p><p>Then, the next Hogsmeade visit came.</p><p>Tom made his rounds. He laughed and talked and smiled with each group of Gryffindor First Years. He even found a good-humored Second Year Gryffindor on a study break. But none of these Gryffindors were Joe or his mates, so that loneliness in Tom’s chest knocked his next story off-kilter and he sulked out to the grounds.</p><p>It wasn’t until he released a ragged breath that he realized he was scanning the edge of the Forbidden Forest for a familiar cluster of cherry trees.</p><p>Tom planted his heel in the dewy grass and went to turn smartly back to the doors when he spotted him. Slumped casually beneath a hearty birch tree a judicious ten meters from the lake’s edge, a boy in a Ravenclaw scarf had a parchment paper pressed to his thigh as he scribbled onto it with a ragged quill, occasionally referencing an open textbook splayed out on the grass beside him.</p><p>As the boy reached out to flip to a new page in his textbook, Tom watched in fascination as the breeze suddenly stole the parchment from his leg.</p><p>Magic wasn’t instinctive for Tom, not like it was for Joe. So he stumbled after it, arms outstretched and wand forgotten in his pocket.</p><p>The parchment wavered dangerously over the lake’s edge, and Tom grabbed a handful of cattails to steady him as he leaned out over the water. His fingers brushed the corner of the parchment, and he went to snag it neatly from its watery grave.</p><p>As his index and middle fingers caught the parchment in his hand, the cattails became uprooted. Tom hissed as his calf was submerged in the icy chill, and he screwed his eyes shut as he prepared to fall forward completely.</p><p>A hand suddenly gripped his forearm and yanked him back to the muddy embankment.</p><p>Tom whipped around, parchment held high overhead, and his victorious whoop stuttered as he came face-to-face with the Ravenclaw boy.</p><p>“Thanks,” he grumbled sheepishly, reaching up to carefully disentangle Tom’s clenched fist from his dry, wrinkled parchment paper.</p><p>Tom couldn’t help but gawk at the boy’s eyes. They were the kind of blue one of Myrtle’s puppies had had when they sold it off to his muggle cousin’s father-in-law. Something about above-average risk of blindness swirled idly in his head as he distractedly took in the rest of his handsome face.</p><p>Automatically, pant leg dripping wet, he answered, “No problem! Name’s Tom Blake.”</p><p>Tom reached out his hand.</p><p>“Aren’t you Joe Blake’s younger brother?”</p><p>Suddenly, the comfortable weight of being Joe Blake’s shadow tightened around his neck.</p><p>“No! I’m Tom, just Tom.”</p><p>The boy’s face went slack, and uneven blotches of pink stretched from his pale cheeks to his ears. His mouth opened wordlessly, and Tom watched delightedly as he rushed to compose himself.</p><p>“Oh, sorry. It’s just that you look so much like him—”</p><p>“But younger. Yeah, I know,” Tom said quickly. “He is my older brother, actually. I don’t know why I said that.”</p><p>The boy’s face was scrunched, a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips. With a huff of laughter, he reached out to shake Tom’s hand.</p><p>“William Schofield.”</p><p>A decent enough name, Tom supposed.</p><p>With a smile, Tom asked, “Well, what’re you doin’ working so close to the water, Scho?”</p><p>Sheepishly, he answered, “Didn’t give myself enough time to write my essay for Trelawney earlier this week, so I didn’t have time to go to Hogsmeade. Figured sitting outside was a decent enough trade.”</p><p>The boys steadily traipsed back to the birch tree, where Will resumed his slumped position. Tom fell backwards with a sigh, laying on his back and looking up into the tree’s yellowing leaves.</p><p>“Merlin,” he breathed out, a smile pinching his cheeks. “I sacrificed my dry sock for a Divination essay? Wish you would’ve mentioned it while it was flying around like it was hexed.”</p><p>Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Will straighten up like he’d been bitten by a pixie from hell.</p><p>“Oh, shit!” he laughed. “You’re right. Should’ve let the wind take it.”</p><p>Tom couldn’t help but giggle as Will dug in his pockets, parchment paper and quill safely tucked under the weight of his textbook. Tom shifted his elbows so he could prop himself up and better watch Schofield. A small smile still lit up his face, and his hair was decidedly more tousled than it was before the parchment incident.</p><p>Will apparently found what he was looking for. He produced a sleek wand from his breast pocket and asked, “May I?”</p><p>Tom nodded dumbly. Will could have been asking to jinx his ears to turn inside-out, and he realized he’d say yes. Anything to keep his attention fixed squarely on him.</p><p>Will waved his wand and muttered incoherently, and Tom nearly melted into the burst of warmth his pants gave off as they dried in a flash of steam.</p><p>“Better?”</p><p>“Yeah, thanks.”</p><p>“My older sister taught that one to me over the summer. Hadn’t practiced it yet.”</p><p>“You could’ve burned my leg off, Scho.”</p><p>“Better you than me, Tom.”</p><p>As Will’s eyes skittered from the lake to find Tom’s gaze, time seemed to stop. And Tom found he couldn’t help himself but laugh along with Will and his strange humor.</p><p>The bleached bark of the birch tree might not match his cherry trees’ petals exactly, but it was close enough for Tom to forget that growing ache of loneliness.</p><p>Will Schofield was beautiful, and he looked like home.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Love Language</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year prefect of Ravenclaw, was very interested in women.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year prefect of Gryffindor, had known this since his second year at Hogwarts.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Joe had kickstarted the summer between Tom’s First and Second Year with a bleeding ear and a twisted ankle.  Tom got a splitting pain in his side for solidarity.</p><p>Tom had been helping Scho to load his sisters’ extra trunks into the compartments of the train back to King’s Cross.  Margaret had conveniently disappeared into a mass of Fourth Year Hufflepuffs, while Sharon regally instructed Will and Tom from her perch atop Will’s trunk.</p><p>Will rolled his eyes at Sharon’s instructions, but Tom couldn’t help standing at attention.  Sharon was pretty—the whole First Year class agreed—and Tom was happy to have her puppy blue eyes trained on his every movement.</p><p>“No.  No!  Will!  You’ll break it like that!”</p><p>“Well, if you want it packed so precisely, why don’t you get—”</p><p>Tom scrambled to the compartment to hold Sharon’s trunk just so.  Will let out an angry huff.  It sounded like he was winding up to quit.</p><p>“Get away from me, you half-blood <em>freak</em>!”</p><p>Through the window of the train, Tom saw himself, just a little older, throw a punch at Marcus Flint, and Sharon’s trunk of fragile whatevers teetered dangerously on the edge of the compartment.  Before he knew it, Tom had leapt off the stationary train and sprinted to the edge of the growing crowd of upperclassmen.</p><p>“Say it, again!” he heard Joe bellow.  “I fucking dare you!”</p><p>Wand forgotten in his pocket, Tom jumped into the fray.  He was smaller than most everybody piling into the fight, but he had the advantage of throwing a punch faster than the incantation of a nasty hex.</p><p>Soon enough, he made it to Joe’s back and narrowly dodged an errant spell streaking past his shoulder.  Just in time, too.</p><p>Joe reached his hand down to shield his sprained ankle as one of his mates stepped backwards to find his footing in his close-quarter duel, and Flint got an excited look in his eye as he raised his wand.</p><p>Tom jostled past Joe and jumped at Flint, who let out a surprised sound and fell on his back with a painful clack of his teeth.  Tom wound back his arm, ready to deliver a sound punch anywhere on Flint’s face—he wasn’t picky—as Flint quickly jabbed his wand into the soft pudge of Tom’s stomach toward his ribs.</p><p>The jab threw Tom off-balance, and he rolled off Flint with a wheeze.  Coughing, he pushed himself up to his hands and got ready to launch another attack on Flint, who was still lying prone of the floor.</p><p>“And just what do you think you’re doing, Mr. Blake?  Mr. Flint?”</p><p>Professor McGonagall.</p><p>The wind practically fled Tom’s lungs again as he flipped over to see his Head of House glaring disapprovingly down at the Gryffindor and Slytherin.</p><p>“Nothing, ma’am,” they coughed simultaneously.</p><p>Plastering a dopey smile on his face, Tom added, “Just trying to tell my good friend Flint I’ll miss him over the summer.  Got a little too excited, Professor!”</p><p>With a twin, beatific smile, Joe leant down to extend a hand to Tom and hauled him from the ground.</p><p>“You know how Tom is, Professor!  Always so excited like a puppy!  He hardly knows his own strength.”</p><p>After a sound talking-to from Professor McGonagall which would haunt Tom’s dreams for the first month of summer vacation, Tom and Joe ambled back to their trunks with their tails between their legs.</p><p>“And don’t think I won’t inform your mother, gentlemen!”</p><p>Effectively rebuked, both Blakes paused at their trunks as chatter slowly overtook the overwhelming silence of the train landing.</p><p>“Mum’s going to kill us.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“Why were we fighting, again?”</p><p>“Because Flint’s an arse.”</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>“You okay?”</p><p>A wheeze.  “Peachy.  Yourself?”</p><p>A wince.  “Never been better.  Go say good-bye to Schofield or whatever.  I’ll pack our trunks.”</p><p>“Are you sure?  That was—”</p><p>“Just leave me alone for a bit, Tom.”</p><p>“But—”</p><p>“I said leave me alone.”</p><p>Tom bit back whatever he was going to say next.  From the slant of Joe’s shoulders, and the hard look in his face, Joe was definitely still mad about whatever Flint had done.  It was best to leave him alone for now.</p><p>Tom walked slowly to the Schofields, hand still clutching his side.  Will seemed determined to glare a hole through Tom’s hand.</p><p>Tom opened his mouth to tell Will that he was obviously <em>fine</em>, but then Sharon crashed his train of thought.</p><p>“Wow, that was really brave of you, Tom.”</p><p>Pretty Sharon, with her puppy blue eyes and beautiful older brother, thought he was brave?  Tom’s brain short-circuited for a moment, and he smiled shyly at the other First Year.</p><p>“Shut <em>up</em>, Sharon,” Will hissed.  Tom broke eye contact with Sharon to train his attention back on Will.  Always Will.</p><p>The three stood awkwardly, Tom trying to regulate his breath with his hand pressed insistently at his side, while Will and Sharon made annoyed faces at one another.  Sharon broke the moment with an irritated huff.</p><p>“Fine, I’ll go pack my trunks on my own.”  She stomped away and called over her shoulder, “Thanks for nothing, Will!”</p><p>Will looked beseechingly at Tom, that odd glare reserved for siblings wiped from his face.</p><p>“You were there, Tom!  You <em>know</em> I was helping.”</p><p>With a laugh that sounded a little too much like a wheeze, Tom answered, “I don’t know, Scho.  Could’ve been Margaret lifting all those trunks overhead.”</p><p>“I think I’ll commit a homicide or two this summer.”</p><p>Tom laughed outright, wheeze abated.</p><p>“In all seriousness, Blake,” Will started haltingly, “I’ll miss you.  I guess.”</p><p>With a genuine smile, nothing like the one he’d given McGonagall, Tom chirped, “I’ll miss you, too, Will!”  He launched forward to catch him in a hug.  “Write me sometime!  I’ll get bored with just Joe around.”</p><p>“I’ll write,” Will grumbled as he disentangled himself from Tom’s hug.  His cheeks and ears were red again.  “Don’t get into any more fights.”</p><p>“Me?  I’d never!” Tom laughed.</p><p>“Don’t do it!”</p><p>The summer passed in a blur of cherry trees, owls, playfights with Joe, a disappointing lack of Ribena and a painful dosing of French.</p><p>Mum had kept up Dad’s subscription to <em>The Prophet</em>, even after the war, and she was getting worried over how the headlines were echoing stories nearly a decade earlier.  When she heard about Joe and Tom’s fight at the train station over blood status, she made a backup plan.</p><p>If things got bad like they did around when Dad died, they’d move out of the country.  France seemed far enough for Mum.</p><p>“It’s not up for discussion,” she’d growled at Joe and Tom.</p><p>Then, she invited Sister Claire to tea.</p><p>Sister was nice enough.  She taught at the parochial elementary school Mum couldn’t afford to send Joe and Tom to when they were little, and she was patient.</p><p>Joe picked up on French quicker than Tom did.  That might have had to do with Tom’s deliberately butchered pronunciation.</p><p>In his mind, if he didn’t learn French, his family couldn’t move to France.  (And Will wouldn’t plod forward in his life without Tom.  But that was beside the point.)</p><p>Summer came to a close, and despite Tom’s best efforts, he was intermediately proficient in conversational French.</p><p>Arriving a King’s Cross, hopping onto the Hogwarts Express, finding Will—a little taller—slumped against the train window looking like he was already half asleep by the phantom rocking of the stationary train, Tom finally settled.</p><p>France was only a maybe.  It didn’t have to be any bigger than that.</p><p>Hogwarts was abuzz with speculation about the Triwizard Tournament.  It’d been ages since the last one, and school pride was at an all-time high as two Hogwarts students were chosen to compete against champions from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang.  Never mind that Potter shouldn’t have been entered at all.</p><p>Tom found himself caught between upholding the unspoken rule against fraternizing with the enemy or excitedly welcoming each new student individually.</p><p>Inevitably, he did the latter.</p><p>It started with a girl from Beauxbatons named Laurie.</p><p>She’d seen Tom and Will walking toward the Great Hall and had frantically asked, “Excuse me?  My name is Laurie, end I cannot find ze Great Hall?  Can you ‘elp?”</p><p>“Of course!” Tom said after a beat of awkward silence.  He looked at Will and his slackened face.  Gesturing between the two of them, Tom excitedly chattered, “We were just heading there!  My name’s Tom.”</p><p>Tom paused, waiting for Will to introduce himself.  A moment passed.  He seemed to have gone mute.</p><p>“And this,” he gestured, “is Scho.  He’s usually more talkative than this.  You’re from Beauxbatons, right?”</p><p>Laurie nodded hesitantly.</p><p>“Yes.  Yes, I study at Beauxbatons.  I cannot find ze Great Hall,” she repeated.  “Can you ‘elp?”</p><p>Tom realized Laurie didn’t quite follow what he’d said, and Will didn’t seem all that inclined to chip in.</p><p>So Tom wracked his mind for his summer French lessons, packed neatly away under ‘Skills I’ll Never Need Because We’re Not Moving to France, Ever’ and haltingly said, “Je suis désolé.  Ma franҫaise n’est pas trés bienne.”</p><p>He paused to see Laurie smiling happily.  She gestured for him to go on.</p><p>“Mon ami, Will, et moi, nous allons au Great Hall.  Veut-tu marcher avec nous?”</p><p>“Oui!  Merci, my English,” she paused and looked to the darkened ceiling as if looking for a fully-formed sentence scrawled in the stones.  “My English is better than thees?  Usually.  I am nervous.  Oui, I am nervous.”</p><p>“Well, my French is awful, so we can’t complain!  Come with us.”</p><p>The three started walking to the Great Hall.  Will was still suspiciously mute as Tom continued to chatter at Laurie in English.</p><p>What he was saying was inconsequential.  It was more background noise than anything else.  Laurie just looked relieved to have the silence occupied.</p><p>Tom chanced a questioning glance up at Will and found that his attention was fully fixed on Laurie.  That blush that usually stopped at Will’s ears was creeping down his neck, and Tom couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was throwing him off balance so much.</p><p>As they entered the Great Hall, and Laurie left to join her schoolmates, Will finally found his voice again.</p><p>Clearing his throat, he said, “I didn’t know you spoke French.”</p><p>“Oh,” Tom said awkwardly.  “Yeah, Mum’s idea.”</p><p>Tom couldn’t bring himself to look at Will, nervous that he would find out about his mum’s paranoid plan by the nervous twitch of an eye or something equally stupid.</p><p>“That’s cool,” Will said unevenly.  He paused, then sputtered, “Maybe you could teach me?”</p><p>Tom looked up at Will, staring determinedly at the Hufflepuff table with a level of concentration hitherto unseen.</p><p>“Really?  I mean, sure.  Yeah, if you want.”</p><p>“I—I want.  Yeah, I want to learn some.”</p><p>Over the next few weeks, between evading McGonagall’s watchful eye, shouting himself hoarse at Triwizarding events and sitting through Professor Moody’s frankly terrifying DADA lessons, Tom carved out time to teach Will some French.</p><p>Tom’s pronunciation was already horrible as it was, so Scho’s—naturally—sounded worse.  It’s something they laughed about as they tried and talked back and forth, and ultimately, not a lot of French was learned.</p><p>It’s the afternoon following a Hogsmeade visit, and Tom gravitated a tad closer to Will than he’d normally allow.  They’re sprawled beneath the birch tree by the lake, trading increasingly absurd bastardizations of French and English when a shadow suddenly blocked Tom’s view of the grounds.</p><p>He sat up and happily greeted Laurie, Will choking covertly in the background.</p><p>She smiled politely at Tom and looked beyond him to Scho.  Her face lit up in a genuine grin.</p><p>“Will, you said you would walk me to ze Great Hall again zis afternoon.  Are you coming?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he says hurriedly.  “Yeah, I didn’t forget.”</p><p>Before Tom could register what’s happening, Will’s shadow joined Laurie’s, blocking even more of Tom’s view of the grounds.</p><p>“I’ll catch up with you later, Tom!” he called over his shoulder, arm thrown around Laurie’s shoulders.</p><p>A strange feeling, like that loneliness he so often felt his first year, squeezed Tom’s chest.  Only this felt sharper, more poignant than that near-forgotten ache.</p><p>Tom got up and walked over to a cluster of Second Year Gryffindors.  He’s welcomed warmly, and he spun a new story involving those four dragons and a sleep-deprived Headmaster Dumbledore that drew surprised laughs from his audience with every twist until the call for dinner cuts it short.</p><p>With a grumble, he and his housemates traipsed indoors, shaking the chill from their robes.  As he flexed his hands, hoping to get some circulation back into his numbed fingers, Tom’s attention was caught by an unusual flutter of a tapestry.</p><p>Watching dumbly, Tom saw Will emerge from behind it, looking significantly more rumpled than he did only half an hour earlier.</p><p>His lips were red—his ears more so—and he had the goofiest smile on his face as he swaggered nonchalantly in the vague direction of the Great Hall.  Most tellingly, Laurie was latched to his arm, equally rumpled.  Equally ridiculous.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hey!  I hope you all liked it.  Thanks for leaving so many kudos already.<br/>Don't kill me for how I wrote Laurie lol.  I was trying to remember how JK wrote Fleur's accent, and it was too ridiculous not to include</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Implosion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I hope you all like it so far!  I'm doing this rather than online classes.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year prefect of Ravenclaw, was a twat.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year prefect of Gryffindor, had known this since his third year at Hogwarts.</em>
</p><hr/><p>It’s lunchtime, and Tom was sitting next to Joe for the first time in ages.  Joe’s mates—now Seventh Years—greeted Joe’s sometimes shadow and carried on with their jokes about Umbridge’s unusually short wand.  Tom wasn’t paying much attention.  He kept covertly glancing at the Ravenclaw table to see Will sitting with Padma Patil, his Prefect partner.</p><p>They looked like they got on well.  Tom stabbed at his plate with a tad of viciousness.</p><p> Joe’s banter was interrupted by the beat of owls’ wings.  Duke landed with a thump in front of Joe, pecking impatiently at his fingers as he went to free the letter furled up in Duke’s carrier.</p><p>“Merlin’s beard, Tom!” Joe shouted as Duke’s beak caught Joe’s index finger.  “You see what happens when you give an owl too many treats, now?  What’ve I been telling you?”</p><p>“Duke deserves every treat I give him!” he defended as he fed Duke a morsel for exerting self-control and not biting clean through Joe’s finger.  “I don’t know what to tell you!”</p><p>Admittedly, Duke was fatter than the average owl.  It was a wonder, sometimes, that he could get airborne at all.  Tom couldn’t help himself, though.  He spent half his summers trapping mice for Joe’s pet.</p><p>“Fucking whale of the sky,” Joe muttered darkly.  “Give me that letter.”</p><p>With a triumphant huff, Joe dodged Duke’s next peck and snagged the note.</p><p>“Off you get, then!” he snapped.</p><p>“Not without his treat,” Tom sing-songed and fed Duke another morsel.</p><p>Food clutched in his talons, Duke noisily waved his wings and took off, leaving Joe’s goblet toppled over onto his plate.  Tom couldn’t help but giggle at Duke’s chaos, and he caught Will looking in his direction, an amused smile on his face.</p><p>Tom’s day was looking significantly brighter.</p><p>“Shit.”</p><p>Roused from his happy thoughts, Tom’s attention snapped to Joe.  With an uncoordinated clatter, Joe stood shakily from the table, stalking out the Great Hall.</p><p>Looking between Joe’s mates, who looked equally baffled, Tom got up and followed his brother on legs that looked just like Joe’s, just a little younger.</p><p>He caught up to him outside the Great Hall on the way to Gryffindor Tower.</p><p>“What?  What happened?”</p><p>Jerkily, Joe handed over the crumpled note, and Tom found a single hastily scrawled line in his mother’s handwriting.</p><p> </p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>Pack your things.  I’ll come collect you and your brother soon.</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>“No!” he muttered.  Looking up at Joe, he repeated, “No, no.  She doesn’t mean it.  She can’t possibly mean it.  Can she?”</p><p>Tom felt tears burning at the edges of his eyes.  He saw Joe mirroring his expression.</p><p>“C’mon,” he whispered hoarsely.  “Let’s go pack.”</p><p>As Tom looked around his Third Year dormitory, he decided he wouldn’t pack for France.  He’d pack for the Forbidden Forest, instead.</p><p>He could just loiter in there until his mum realized what a dumb idea this all was.</p><p>Resolve steeling, he packed a sack with the essentials.  His wand, a canteen with Ribena, a bundle of blankets that could substitute a sleeping pack, a cheap pocketknife he’d gotten from his uncle last Christmas and a whole sketchbook of maps he’d kept since he was ten.</p><p>Flipping through it hurriedly, worried that Joe would come downstairs with his trunks and find Tom preparing his escape, Tom confirmed the necessities.  He had a rough map sketched of the Forbidden Forest pieced together from Joe’s stories of Professor Hagrid’s Care of Magical Creatures class and page upon page of information about navigational stars lifted from First Year Astronomy and endless summer nights spent stretched out in the cherry orchard.  Tom was reasonably confident he could find shelter and avoid all the creepy bits.</p><p>Slipping on some muggle winter gear—a parka, a pair of insulated gloves, a hat and thick snow boots—Tom was ready for his great escape.</p><p>Sneaking outside his dorm, he heard a muffled thump up the staircase followed by a pained cuss from Joe.</p><p>The coast was clear.</p><p>Ideally, Tom would spirit himself away into the woods with the cover of night, but he had no clue when his mum would come knocking at the castle doors.  Looking left, then right, he saw the snow-covered grounds were completely bereft of students and teachers.</p><p>Lunch should last for a few more minutes, so Tom hoped nobody would step out the Great Hall and suddenly fancy a walk outdoors.  It’d be hard to explain away his missing robes and bulging knapsack.</p><p>Bracing himself, looking up at Joe’s dormitory’s window, Tom huffed out a steadying breath and made a break for the forest.</p><p>Mum and Joe could go hole up in France.  Tom would find his way back to Will’s side at the edge of the lake, eventually.</p><p>Tom was on the run for three nights, living comfortably in a hollow of tree roots, when he decided he simply couldn’t live without a helping of chicken thighs any longer.</p><p>He weighed the risk.  Half of Hogwarts was out here looking for Tom, and by the increasing frequency of flares, he knew efforts were escalating nightly.</p><p>He could be walking straight into a trap.</p><p>But Tom had a plan, hatched from a whole day of planning while munching on berries he’d scavenged from the nearby foliage.  Wait ‘til dark, cast a silencing charm on his boots, reference his updated sketchbook to make his way back to Hogwarts (preferably without tiptoeing over that colony of blast-ended skrewts), catch a house elf, and shake him down for chicken thighs.  Escape back into the forest, and don’t stop to see if Scho was still mooning over Padma.</p><p>Don’t get caught, and don’t look for Will.</p><p>Easy.</p><p>Nightfall came, and Tom whispered an incantation for his boots’ silencing charm.</p><p>Holding his breath, he crept out from his makeshift home and felt the full blast of chill his warming charms had dulled in the tree roots.</p><p>Teeth gritted, he looked up in the patchy overhead canopy to make out some navigational stars.  Having found one, he mentally plotted his route back to Hogwarts.</p><p>Tom began his trek back to the castle with a spring in his step.  Just a couple hours from now, he’d return to his bedroll with a pile of chicken bones scattered about his pillow.  He smiled quietly and ducked under a tree branch.</p><p>Then, the first flare exploded through the sky.  The search party had set out once again.</p><p>Tom’s pace quickened as his eyes darted nervously through the foliage.  He’d prefer the blast-ended skrewt colony over Professor McGonagall after curfew any day.</p><p>At his first glance of Hogwarts between a pine and oak tree, Tom ducked behind a wizened tree stump.  He’d heard a muttered curse that was unmistakably human.</p><p>“Stupid boy is going to get himself killed out here in the forest, and suddenly it’s my problem,” he heard Professor Vector darkly mumble.  “And where’s Dolores in all this?  Napping.  Napping because bloody fucking Fudge said so.  Progress for the sake of progress, my arse.”</p><p>Tom risked a glance from his stump and saw Professor Vector look at her wristwatch.</p><p>“Right.  I’m due for a check-in.”  Raising her wand, she said steadily, “<em>Periculum</em>!”</p><p>Another flare came exploding from her wand, an echoing one lit up deeper in the forest.  Tom waited for Professor Vector to wander deeper into the forest path, then made a break for the edge of the tree line.</p><p>Quietly renewing his silencing charm, he scanned the grounds for any watchful eyes.  Professor Hagrid’s hut was dark, just as empty as it had been all year.  The lake lapped calmly at its shore, and Tom was struck with a terrible heartache.</p><p>Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to see Scho?  For just a minute?</p><p>He shook his head.  He had chicken thighs to secure.</p><p>With a frantic scan of the vacant grounds, Tom began to sprint to the castle doors.</p><p>In all of Tom’s careful planning, he didn’t account for a Prefect watch stationed on the grounds.  He especially didn’t account for Will Schofield being on rotation.</p><p>Not even ten meters from the tree line, Tom spotted a lanky figure—previously hidden by the shadow of Professor Hagrid’s hut—cutting across the grounds at an even faster sprint.  Before Tom had a chance to reach into his boot for his wand—stupid, so stupid, why hadn’t he just held it in his hand—he heard a spine-tinglingly familiar voice cry out.</p><p>“<em>Stupefy</em>!”</p><p>Tom’s body went rigid.  There went Tom’s plan to avoid Will entirely.</p><p>Face smashed uncomfortably into the snow, Tom listened resignedly as Will’s footsteps crunched loudly in his direction.</p><p>“Blake!  Where the hell have you been?”</p><p>Tom meant to respond with a casual, <em>Oh, you know.  Around</em>.  But only a muffled groan escaped.</p><p>Hands gripped at his arm and hurriedly flipped Tom’s body over.  His nose was numb and his darting eyes could hardly make out Will’s looming silhouette.</p><p>Scho’s face was red from exertion, his breath coming out in harsh pants as he braced his hands against his knees.</p><p>“Merlin, you’re fast,” he coughed.  “You’ve had us all worried sick.  I think Sharon actually threw up at dinner tonight.  And your mum is ready to kill you, just so you know.”</p><p>Tom glared mutely from the ground.</p><p>“Joe’s a mess.  He keeps stopping by my table to see if I’ve gotten any encrypted messages from you, <em>which I don’t</em>.”  At that, a flash of hurt spasms across Will’s face.  “Where do you get off running like that?”</p><p>Tom let out a plaintive groan from the ground.  The snow was digging insistently at his uncovered neck, and his back was turning numb.</p><p>With a curse, Will uttered, “<em>Rennervate</em>.”</p><p>“Oh, thank God,” Tom breathed as he pushed himself off the snowy ground.  “Listen, I’m sorry, mate, but Mum wants to move Joe and me to France, and there’s no way I’m going.”</p><p>“France?”</p><p>“I know, Beauxbatons blue just doesn’t complement my skin tone,” Tom said lightly.</p><p>“Why would you go to France?”</p><p>“Mum’s worried there’s going to be another wizarding war.  She doesn’t really want us here like my dad was,” he says hurriedly.  “But doesn’t <em>know</em> that, Scho!  She doesn’t know there’ll be a war, and I don’t want to leave.”</p><p>The boys fell into an uncomfortable silence.  Another pair of flares lit up the sky, casting strange shadows on Will’s face.</p><p>“Maybe you should.”</p><p>Tom gaped.</p><p>“Are you kidding me?  There’s nothing to worry about!”</p><p>Will glared harshly.</p><p>“There’s plenty to worry about.  Weird shit keeps happening every year, and it just keeps getting more serious.  Diggory died last term, Tom.”</p><p>“Yeah, but that’s just a Triwizard Tournament!” Tom whined.  “Look, I won’t ever sign up for one of those.  Promise.  But I’ve got to stay here at Hogwarts.  I can’t go to France.”</p><p>Will sat abruptly on the snow beneath him, burying his head in his hands.  His ears were red from the cold.</p><p>“Tom, there’s something coming.  We both know that,” he said slowly, muffled by his gloves.  “Your mum’s right.  You can’t get caught up in it.”</p><p>Tom paused, examined his boots.</p><p>“But, Scho,” he said quietly.  “I’m not muggle-born like my dad.  They’ll leave me alone.”</p><p>A pause.</p><p>“No.  They won’t.”</p><p>Will still had his head buried in his hands, wand dangling precariously from his gloved fingertips.</p><p>“Listen,” Tom began frantically.  “Don’t tell anybody I was here.  I just came back for some chicken thighs.  I’m fine in the forest, just waiting for my mum to get her head out her arse.  Please, Scho?  Please?  I promise I’ll write you soon.  Is that what you want?”</p><p>Will didn’t answer.  The silence stretched between them, and another round of flares went up, closer than before.</p><p>Slowly, Will’s chin tilted up.  Tom could see a terrible resolve in them.</p><p>“No!  No, Will, don’t do it!  Don’t turn me in!”</p><p>Tears blurred his eyes, freezing on his cheeks.</p><p>Then, with a whispered <em>periculum</em>, Tom’s vision filled with red.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Near Misses</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for the comments so far!  They mean a lot to me, so thanks for taking the time to write them.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year prefect of Ravenclaw, was unavoidable, despite him being a beautiful twat that was very much interested in women.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year prefect of Gryffindor, had known this since his fourth year at Hogwarts.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Joe had graduated, and he’d found himself an entry-level job as an owlet trainer.  He claimed it was temporary, but Joe seemed suspiciously proud that not one of the owlets he trained were inclined to bite him for treats.</p><p>Tom was still enrolled at Hogwarts by some miracle of God and Dumbledore.</p><p>“Mr. Blake, you seem remarkably well considering you spent the better part of the week camping in the Forbidden Forest.”</p><p>“Thank you, Headmaster Dumbledore, sir.”</p><p>“I’ve been informed by Professor Vector that you came back for chicken thighs?”</p><p>“Yes, sir,” he said distractedly.  His mum turned frantically from an armchair, practically stumbling as she went to stand up, an inscrutable look on her face.  “I had a craving, sir.”</p><p>“Perfectly understandable.”</p><p>Tom could hardly pay attention to Dumbledore as his mother rushed at him.  He flinched, as her expression seemed caught between murder and relief.</p><p>Her hands clamped like iron around his arms as he was yanked into a violent hug, face crushed into her armpit and hands wheeling as he tried to maintain his balance.</p><p>“Thank God!” she cried.  “Oh, my God.  Thomas, thank God you’re alright.  You nearly gave me and Joe a heart attack!”</p><p>“I’m sorry, Mum,” he mumbled into her shirt.</p><p>“Lord, I’ve got to call up Gran,” she breathed to herself.  “No, no, she’s probably already boarded the train north.”</p><p>“Gran’s coming?” he squeaked, muffled by her shirt again.</p><p>“Well, of course she’s coming!” she spoke harshly in his ear, moving to hold him in front of her as she took in his muddy boots and red nose.  “So’s Leonard.  He was very concerned that Gran would board the wrong one.”</p><p>“Mum, I’m sorry!  Honest.  I didn’t want half the family to turn up!”</p><p>“Jesus, Mildred will never let me hear the end of this.  Why do you do this to me, Thomas?  Michelle and Paulie never gave her this kind of trouble!”</p><p>“But ‘Chelle just—”</p><p>“Oh, thank God we’re fleeing the country already!  Christmas would be unbearable this year.”</p><p>At this, Tom became frantic.</p><p>“Listen, listen!  We can’t go to France.  I forgot the whole language.  Honest.  I’d be a wreck there!  You should’ve seen last year, even, when everybody came from Beauxbatons.  Nobody understood a word I said!  They’d only speak English at me, and it hardly sounded like English.  We can’t do it, Mum!  We can’t.”</p><p>“Really?” she screeched.  “You disappear for a week, and you suddenly think you have a say in all this?  If your father were here—"</p><p>“It would be a shame, Mrs. Blake,” Dumbledore calmly interjected, “to see young Mr. Blake leave Hogwarts.  He’s a gifted student and a natural leader of his classmates.  Recently, he has shown a great capacity for self-reliance.  I thought he had all the makings of a prefect.”</p><p>Tom’s mother paused, as a proud glimmer snuck its way onto her face.</p><p>“Well, that’s hardly—That’s hardly relevant, Mr. Dumbledore.  Of course, my Tom is a great example of leadership.  He gets it from me, but—”</p><p>“Mr. Blake, your mother and I are incredibly happy to see that you’ve returned safely, but I need to speak with your mother, alone, regarding your future here at Hogwarts.  Dolores, if you could please ensure he makes it back to Gryffindor Tower without detour?”</p><p>“That’s hardly necessary, Albus,” Professor Umbridge simpered from her seat adjacent to Dumbledore’s desk.  “I’d like to be privy to this conversation with Mr. Blake’s,” she paused, “<em>delightful</em> muggle mother.”</p><p>“Dolores, I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.  I’d happily escort him myself, but my knees have been feeling especially creaky now that Mercury is in retrograde.”</p><p>Tom nearly snorted at that, but his mum looked taken in by that expression, nodding solemnly with Dumbledore at Umbridge.</p><p>With a glare and a swish of her offensively pink robes, Umbridge firmly gripped Tom’s arm as he struggled to keep pace all the way back to Gryffindor Tower.</p><p>“I trust you won’t be making anymore trouble tonight, Mr. Blake?” she huffed.</p><p>“No, ma’am,” he muttered, scuffing his boot against the stone floor.</p><p>“Louder, Mr. Blake,” she smiled nastily.  “Perhaps, you forgot the typical volume of civilized speech as you camped with half-breeds in the forest?”</p><p>“No, ma’am,” he gritted out.  “I won’t be getting into more trouble tonight.”</p><p>“Well, I should hope not!” she giggled.  “If it were up to me, you’d be expelled for that stunt, Mr. Blake.”</p><p>Tom felt his heart seemingly stutter to a halt as his eyes snapped up to Umbridge’s cold glare.</p><p>“Rest well, Mr. Blake!” she tittered as she darted back in the direction of Dumbledore’s office.</p><p>Tom exhaled heavily, trying to get his heart rate back under control.</p><p>“Cheer up, darling,” the portrait said.  “You’re home, now!  And I expect to hear everything about your jaunt into the wilderness once you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep!”</p><p>“Alright, Lady.  Thank you,” he smiled tiredly at her.  “<em>Baubles</em>.”</p><p>The Fat Lady swung inward, and Tom was greeted with a roar.</p><p>The whole House was packed into the Common Room, even a few Hufflepuffs had managed to claim space beside the window.</p><p>Tom was pulled into a sea of grasping hands and happy cheers.  Fred and George Weasley began whooping from opposite ends of the room.</p><p>Joe fought his way through the mob surrounding Tom to wrap his arm around Tom’s neck.</p><p>Tom, thrown off his balance, fell back into his brother as he laughed hysterically, “Where the fuck did you go, idiot?  You left me with <em>Mum</em>!”</p><p>“I wasn’t,” he struggled, “really thinking about that, Joe.”</p><p>“You hear that, everyone!” Joe hollered.  “He wasn’t thinking!”</p><p>“He wasn’t thinking!” the Common Room echoed back.  “He wasn’t thinking!  He wasn’t thinking!”</p><p>The room dissolved into a mess of chanting and giggling.  Gryffindors continued crowding around, slapping him good-naturedly on the back as he finally wrestled out of Joe’s hold.</p><p>“We were worried about you, mate!”</p><p>“Take me with you next time!”</p><p>“Merlin, you stink like hippogriff shit!”</p><p>Joe stayed unusually close, trailing after Tom by his hold on his hood as he slowly made his rounds in the Common Room.</p><p>Tom leaned back into Joe’s grip, “Blimey!  It’s hot as hell in here!  I’m going to go change.”</p><p>Cheers followed as Tom and Joe darted up the staircase.</p><p>“And take a bath!” someone screamed after Tom.</p><p>Tom sat heavily at the edge of the bed, dirt crumbling off his shoulders onto his rumpled bedspread, as Joe leaned against the bedpost.</p><p>The two grinned at each other, and Tom flopped with a groan back onto his mattress.</p><p>“It’s good to be back.”</p><p>A pause.</p><p>“Would have been better if you hadn’t left at all,” Joe said sincerely.</p><p>Tom lifted his head.</p><p>“No, we’d be wearing blue berets by now.  Better the forest than that hell.”</p><p>“<em>Tom</em>,” Joe chided.  “Mum was really shook up.  Don’t do that again.”</p><p>Tom huffed noisily.</p><p>“I know, I know.  I already said I was sorry.”  Joe glared, looking ready to explain how ‘sorry’ wouldn’t cut it, but Tom continued hurriedly.  “But I don’t know why she’s so set on going to France!  It’s not fair.  I can’t—we can’t just leave when Scho—when <em>everyone’s</em> staying behind.”</p><p>“I’m not happy about it either,” Joe said, “but there was a killing.  Mum read about it in <em>The Prophet</em>.  Some muggleborn from Greenwich got in a barfight, and they were all thinking it was a hate crime or whatever.  Turned out to be another muggleborn that got him, but Mum was already here by the time that got published.”</p><p>“So there’s a chance we’re not going anywhere?” Tom said hopefully.  Even to his own ears, he sounded painfully young.</p><p>Joe looked to the ceiling, arms crossed tightly over his chest.</p><p>“A chance, yeah.”</p><p>That chance became definite as Martha Blake walked out Albus Dumbledore’s office.  After a whirlwind weekend of reassuring extended family that Tom hadn’t died running into a monster-infested wood, Tom slumped tiredly at the Gryffindor table, nestled familiarly at Joe’s side, laughing exhaustedly at the jokes about Blake’s Hibernation.</p><p>As he bit satisfactorily into a particularly juicy chicken thigh, Tom made sudden eye contact with Will across the Hall.</p><p>Rage bubbled in some unseen wound buried deep in his chest, and Tom violently flipped Schofield off as he had the audacity to like a kicked puppy after <em>turning him in</em>.</p><p>Schofield’s eyes widened and he hurriedly broke eye contact, staring resolutely at his soup bowl while Tom chomped viciously at his chicken.  As the rush of blood in his ears steadily dulled, he registered the shocked silence of Joe and his mates.</p><p>“Ah!”  His face reddened.  “Sorry ‘bout that.  Don’t know what came over me.”</p><p>The year hurtled by.  Dumbledore disappeared.  Hogwarts began warping into some regimented hellscape dreamt up by Umbridge.  Mum included the occasional ominous <em>Prophet</em> clipping in her letters.  Joe got increasingly snappy as he realized how fucked over he was for NEWTs, and Tom continued avoiding Schofield like the plague.</p><p>Summer was spent in a relaxed haze laid out underneath his mum’s cherry trees with Myrtle curled happily into his side.  He and Joe talked abstractly about apparating around Europe when Tom graduated (<em>if</em>, Joe joked).  Gran and Leonard visited for a month, wherein Mum looked ready to explode, and Michelle had her baby, much to Aunt Millie’s dismay.</p><p>Fourth Year started with a jolt of loneliness.  Tom slumped in a crowded train compartment, staring out the window at the rapidly shrinking outline of King’s Cross.  Joe and his mates were gone.  Tom couldn’t be a happy shadow anymore.  And he certainly couldn’t be William Schofield’s best mate.</p><p>Sharon Schofield staved off that creeping loneliness as his Potions partner.  She was the same as she had been their First Year: bossy.  But in an endearing way.  She’d scrutinize his every move, and regally cite a footnote in their textbook to tell Tom, “No!  You’re doing it all wrong.  Try this.”</p><p>Tom liked when she looked closely with that laser focus in her eyes.  She wasn’t only still bossy.  She was still one of the prettiest girls in his year, and he couldn’t help but get all puffed up when she’d flash a quick smile his way.</p><p>He could almost ignore how Sharon’s quiet fidgeting mirrored Schofield’s.</p><p>“Does your brother fancy anyone lately, Sharon?” Eloise Midgen asked with a grimace.  Judging by how she’d stumbled over her words, she was hoping for a bit more subtlety.</p><p>Sharon stared back exasperatedly with a pinched expression that was a near-perfect replica of Will’s face after Tom had randomly announced he’d rather kiss the giant squid than swallow a single hair from Headmaster Dumbledore’s beard.  (At least he’d succeeded in getting Scho’s attention that day.  He’d been lost in his thoughts, eyes mirroring the unfathomable depths of the lake, and Tom had gotten this peculiar sense that if he left Will to his thoughts much longer, he’d drown.)</p><p>Sharon looked almost exactly like her brother, and for one insane moment, Tom was about to suggest she unscrunch her nose to make a more convincing copy.</p><p>His mouth opened dumbly, and he nearly forgot about Eloise’s presence at their potions table until Sharon ground out, “Will?  I dunno.  Rather wouldn’t keep track, Eloise.”</p><p>“Really?” Eloise breathed out.  “Because last I heard, him and Lisa were snogging behind Three Broomsticks, and Lisa left in a huff when they got caught.  Maybe you’d know if they were still… um… involved?”  Sharon paused, looking beseechingly at Tom to cut this conversation short.  Eloise saw her glance and blurted, “Oh!  I’m sorry, Tom.  I didn’t want to be rude.  I just thought you might not know about all that anymore?  I haven’t seen you and Will with each other in a while, so I guess I just—"</p><p>Tom’s heart dropped to his gut.</p><p>“Neither of us know anything about Will or Lisa or who he fancies currently, Midgen,” Sharon gritted out.  With a dismissive wave to hers and Tom’s simmering potion, she turned bodily away from Eloise to finick with the prepared ingredients.</p><p>Tom schooled his face into something which he hoped resembled his usual expression and flashed a quick smile at Eloise.  She flushed and scurried away with a mumbled apology.</p><p>“Will isn’t seeing anyone,” Sharon told Tom conversationally as she carefully stirred the pot counterclockwise.</p><p>“Oh—erm, that’s nice?”</p><p>“I just didn’t want to tell Eloise because I lent her one of my quills in Second Year and then she gave it back to me all bitten up and slobbered over.”</p><p>“But that was Second Year!”</p><p>“Yes, but she never <em>apologized</em>.”</p><p>“Merlin, you can hold a grudge,” he joked.</p><p>“I don’t know if I quite hold a candle to you, Blake,” she said pointedly, gaze fixedly staring at a swirl of steam rising from the potion.  After a pause, in which Tom sliced a root with a touch more force than necessary, she continued, “Maybe you could talk to him this weekend?  You both miss each other.”</p><p>“Textbook says to give it a rest after two more stirs.”</p><p>“Could you at least consider it?  Really, Will’s been so quiet lately, and—”</p><p>“Professor Slughorn!  I can’t tell if this potion’s the right shade of chartreuse.  Should I add more mandrake leaves?”</p><p>After that disastrous potions lesson, Sharon knew well enough not to bring up Schofield, again, and Tom supposed he was glad.  Those easy conversations they used to have where they’d trade stories about Margaret and Joe had fizzled out; Sharon seemed to realize how closely Scho lurked at the edges of her stories.  So they found safer topics.  Lavender Brown’s questionable hairstyles and Seventh Year Leslie’s increasingly public feud with Mackenzie were their two favorites.</p><p>Nevertheless, Tom caught himself covertly searching Sharon’s face for echoes of that bastard.  They looked so alike, down to the puppy blue eyes, but Tom began to realize with a dull ache in his chest that Sharon’s entertaining gossip couldn’t compare with Scho’s quiet steadiness.</p><p>The year slipped by with Slug Club parties, newspaper clippings of murders and a general sense of unease crept into Hogwarts.  It flared into a panic as Dumbledore’s body was discovered at the base of the Astronomy Tower, and whispers that Death Eaters snuck through the wards reached a deafening crescendo.  Despite all this, life continued on.  Tom continued avoiding Schofield and began flirting with Sharon in earnest.  Joe wrote him regularly and included small pictures of his favorite owlets.</p><p>War loomed threateningly at the wards of Hogwarts, but Tom and his classmates were children of war.  They settled into it and learned to play at normalcy with startling ease.</p><p>Tom lugged his school trunk to the train station, per usual.  He fitted Sharon’s trunk into her compartment, per usual.  She told him to rearrange it, per usual.  They stepped out onto the train landing, making their way to Tom’s trunk, per usual.  Then, they smiled at each other, per usual.</p><p>“Maybe you could write me this summer, Tom?” Sharon asked shyly.</p><p>“Write you?” he echoed, gobsmacked.  “I mean, yeah.  I guess I—”</p><p>“Just so that Duke doesn’t get too fat napping in your room, yeah?” Sharon continued hurriedly, face a worrying shade of red.</p><p>“Yeah, no.  Of course!” he laughed, collar suddenly too tight.  “Can’t leave him to tear up my bedspread again.  He might as well break something of yours.”</p><p>Their conversation came to a halt, both smiling goofily at anything other than each other.</p><p>“Right, I’ll see you soon, then!” Sharon called behind her as she scurried to the train, puppy blue eyes glittering happily.  Tom felt sick to his stomach.</p><p>Two other Ravenclaw girls hung out the window, slapping the panes excitedly as Sharon reached them.  Tom turned quickly to lift his trunk, banishing all thoughts of how nice it would be if Sharon were just a hair taller, a bit more boyish.  A lot more like her brother.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I've got most of the last two chapters written up!  I figure this story should be finished by next Monday.  Happy quarantine, stay safe</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Splinters in Your Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>lol what's school</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year prefect of Ravenclaw, was scared shitless.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year prefect of Gryffindor, had known this since his fifth year at Hogwarts.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Tom’s heart had taken residence in his throat in that dull haze of summer.  There was no hiding from Mum that that same war that’d taken Dad had resurrected itself and was circling over Hogwarts.  Nights were tensely silent as Mum sawed through burnt pork chops at the dining room table.  Joe hardly slunk into the house on weekends as he’d promised, unless he needed to quietly ask Mum for a loan.  Duke grew fatter on his windowsill, warping the wood from his unrelenting weight.</p><p>Sharon wrote a few times, but he found himself ignoring an unopened letter for a week at a time before working up the will to respond lightly.</p><p>She asked to meet up, once.  He politely declined.</p><p>That was the end of the letters.</p><p>Crawling into bed after halfheartedly entertaining Myrtle in the ripening cherry orchard every day, Tom would stare blankly at his Hogwarts trunk tucked haphazardly at the bottom of his closet.  He never bothered to unpack.  If he was ready to go, Mum couldn’t put up that much of a fuss about him going back.</p><p>Soon enough, he found himself staring unseeingly at the cracked ceiling of his Hogwarts dorm rather than his shared childhood bedroom with Joe.  He was unbelievably tired.  Tired of being afraid, tired of being lonely, tired of missing Scho.</p><p>October crept along, and it was as if Hogwarts was hemorrhaging color.  Gryffindor Tower’s rich explosions of red and gold dulled with every hushed whisper and shifting glance.  <em>Potter Watch</em> echoed gratingly from beside the Common Room fire, and Tom distantly felt icy dread creep into his chest every time he darted past Ginny Weasley distractedly pulling at loose strings in her school robes.  Familiar faces slowly warped into the ghoulish masks of Death Eaters who cackled as their boots scuffed the flagstones between classes.  Those flashes of excitement at prefect rounds with Scho that Tom selfishly guarded behind the curve of his lips hardly registered in that trapping slide of molasses that overtook Tom’s senses with every letter he didn’t receive from Joe.</p><p>Tom sat at the edge of his bed, elbows digging into his knees and shaking hands pulling at his unkempt hair.  His wand handle dug insistently into his temple.  He could hardly remember the last time he’d pocketed it.  He couldn’t afford to traipse about Hogwarts like a muggle, not with Fenrir Greyback’s intermittent howls steadily chipping away at his sanity.</p><p>Quietly, he counted his unsteady breaths until he reached to ten.  Then, he counted another five.  Another ten.</p><p>“Fuck,” he ground out, lurching to his feet.</p><p>It was time for patrol.  No use putting it off any longer.</p><p>Eyes cast unwaveringly ahead, Tom marched stiffly down the steps.  Heads turned in the Common Room, and he saw Nigel Wolpert grimace sympathetically as he made his way to the portrait.</p><p>Muffled whispers travelled across the room, and Tom couldn’t help but think the two Third Years stiffly sat beneath the window (out of sight of the grounds, as they’d all learned since Headmaster Snape invited Death Eaters to tour the grounds) knew the truth.</p><p>It didn’t take long for the school to connect his survivalist stunt Third Year with his glinting prefect badge as he boarded the train this year.</p><p>Pointed jabs were slipped into conversations.</p><p>“Can’t believe we’re not allowed firewhiskey in the dorms.  Think your mum can do something about that, Blake?”</p><p>Tom tried laughing along good-naturedly, but he couldn’t help but think his badge burned hotly enough to singe.  He’d gotten into the habit of tugging the fabric of his robes so that they wouldn’t touch his shirt.  If he couldn’t feel the brush of the pin through layers and layers of clothing, he thought, then it couldn’t continue to brand his person.</p><p>Nevertheless, he sometimes thought he felt tendrils of smoke wrapping around his neck.</p><p>Hogwarts without color was as daunting as it had been his first year.  The corridors became unfamiliar as he had to remap efficient routes around the castle.  (Walk down the potions corridor from the West, and you’re likely to get held up by Pansy Parkinson and company.  Try and study by the lake, and Rudolphus Lestrange will call out your blood status across the grounds until you scramble back indoors.  Linger too long at the foot of the Slytherin table to ask Adelaide Murton a Transfiguration question, and your Ribena will transfigure into a pool of wriggling spiders.)</p><p>He was friendly, but he hardly had any friends.  He and Sharon shared a Charms section, but she sat primly beside Eloise Midgen, her quill nibbling apparently forgiven.  He and Scho hardly resumed their easy friendship with their shared weekly patrols.  Despite Tom lifting his friendship ban on Scho, Will seemed preoccupied with Lisa Turpin, who apparently <em>had</em> snogged Will behind Three Broomsticks and wrote him all summer.  Joe hardly wrote, and he seemed pretty resolute pretending to still work at the owlery.  (Tom wasn’t stupid.  He knew the Order was a full-time, unpaid effort.)</p><p>That barbed loneliness was creeping from his chest into his arms and legs, and Tom threw himself into finding some connection.</p><p>It didn’t take long.  His easy conversations were suddenly in high demand, and he sat squarely in the center of Gryffindor’s table at every meal.  Everyone seemed desperate to laugh; it didn’t take much of a story to coax it out of them before they were hushed by withering glares from the Head table.  For once, Tom didn’t have to wait for his loneliness to push him headfirst into a tight-knit group.  They came to him, now.</p><p>Scho, meanwhile, was practically glued to Lisa’s side, hands entangled and thighs pressed together as they murmured quietly.  Schofield would occasionally hum distractedly and scan the room with an inscrutable look, arm snaking around Lisa’s waist to pull her closer.  Tom realized, one day, with a stutter of his chest, that Schofield was checking the exits, protecting what was most important to him.</p><p>Their spot beneath the birch tree had been commandeered by Lestrange.  Ancient, steadfast Hogwarts had changed since they’d last been friends.</p><p>And Tom was becoming uncomfortably aware how much he didn’t just want to be Will’s friend.</p><p>Shuffling into the prefect compartment at the start of the year, Tom had felt a bolt of adrenaline straighten his posture as he spotted Scho.</p><p>He was slouched over, gripping a beaten up quill between his slender fingers as he scrawled messily on a parchment balanced precariously on his knee.  On the empty seat beside him, his schoolbag was spilling books and quills haphazardly and pushed insistently at his hip.</p><p>Tom nearly shook his head to dispel that double-vision which had suddenly superimposed a shorter, ganglier William Schofield quietly working on a Divination essay under a birch tree during a Hogsmeade visit over the impossibly taller man with dark, dark circles under his dull blue eyes.</p><p>He stumbled forward, jolted by a lurch in the train, as Will suddenly looked up.  A ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Tom swore softly, coming to a stop in front of Scho.</p><p>“Anyone sitting here?” he’d asked, gesturing at the mess next to him.</p><p>“I guess you are,” Scho answered.  He didn’t move to pack up his bag, electing to stare at the newly minted prefect badge burning against Tom’s chest.</p><p>“So,” Tom began, ears warming uncomfortably at Will’s scrutiny.  “Should I just move your stuff or—”</p><p>He was cut off as Scho jerked to attention.</p><p>“Oh, right!  Sorry I was just—”</p><p>At that, Scho’s quill fell from his grasp to the floor and the parchment soon followed.  Will didn’t seem to notice, wholly focused on shoving his bookbag into a sense of order.</p><p>Tom leant down, picking up the things he’d dropped, along with a NEWT-level Charms textbook that hurtled suddenly at his head as it teetered off its perch at the edge of the seat.</p><p>“Shit!” Will exclaimed.  His face was taking on that splotchy pink color Tom used to tease Will mercilessly for.  “Sorry!  I didn’t mean to.  Here.  Done.  Take a seat.”  He gestured clumsily at the now-empty seat.</p><p>With a smile practically splitting his face, Tom sat, using Will’s textbook and quill to fill out the attendance parchment and pass it to another prefect.</p><p>Patrol schedules were distributed without fanfare and Tom nudged Will discreetly to show him their names printed next to the Thursday shift.  Will nodded solemnly, and the year began to show a glimmer of promise.</p><p>Until Tom realized he absolutely despised patrol with Scho.  Sure, he’d always been quiet, but this new Schofield preferred to act as if he were mute.  Tom would talk, try and cajole Will into saying something, maybe even give him an indication he was listening by a crack of a smile or a reddening of the ears, but Will was practically stone as he scanned the corridors for disorder.</p><p>At the third hour of their patrol midway through the fall term, Tom had exhausted all conversation topics.  Nothing had snagged Will’s attention.</p><p>“Heard it was unseasonably warm in London this summer.”</p><p>Will responded with a monotone, “It was fine.”</p><p>“That’s nice.  Sharon said it was unbearable.”</p><p>This finally seemed to shake Will loose from his prefect persona.</p><p>“<em>Sharon</em> told you that?”</p><p>“Well, yeah,” Tom said slowly.  “We wrote each other this summer.”</p><p>“You wrote each other this summer,” he echoed.  He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, and with a sneaking glance, Tom saw that he had resumed that vacant expression he’d worked all night to reanimate.</p><p>Tom scrambled for a new topic, fidgeting with his upraised wand so that the light cast from it played wildly in the dulled metallic of portrait frames.</p><p>They turned a corner toward the herbology classroom, and the chill of fall suddenly rushed at them from an open window.  Light bobbing in the semi-darkness, Tom saw the shadow of an unused pot sitting innocently outside the classroom door.</p><p>“Scho, watch this!  I’ve been practicing.”  He pointed his wand, intent on impressing Will with his magic.  That should get him talking, at least.  “<em>Incen</em>—"</p><p>The pot broke with a crash that made Tom jump.  He lost his grip on his wand, and he watched in slow motion as it bounced on the floor with a clatter and extinguished, casting the corridor in complete darkness.</p><p>“<em>Dio</em>!  Shit, shit, shit!  Sorry!”</p><p>Tom fell to his knees, feeling blindly around the stone floor for his wand.  He hissed as his palm caught on a shard of the broken flowerpot, and he brought the hazy outline of his hand closer to his face, poking at it to evaluate the pain.</p><p>“<em>Lumos</em>.”  Will’s silhouette, arm extended and face furious, blinded Tom.</p><p>“Ah!  A little warning next time,” he laughed.  “Geez, Scho, I—”</p><p>“What did you think you were doing?” he screeched.  Gripping the back of Tom’s robes, he hauled him back to his feet.  “The <em>fuck</em>, Blake!”</p><p> Tom rushed to apologize when he was suddenly distracted by Will examining his bleeding hand.  His eyes, ghostly transparent in the wandlight, were trained unwaveringly on his palm, tsking at the rivulet of blood snaking down his thumb.</p><p>“Don’t know any healing spells,” he spoke lowly.</p><p>Tom nodded.  He didn’t think he could do much more at that moment.</p><p>Dropping his hand hastily, Scho asked angrily, “What was that for?”</p><p>“Oh,” he started, wand hand reaching behind him to scratch embarrassedly at his neck.  “I’ve just been practicing.  You know.  For the war, I guess.  Wanted to show you.”</p><p>Will stared inscrutably at him, face cast in eerie shadow from the wandlight so that he looked like the alabaster statue on the second floor.  With a scoff, he turned around and gestured to continue their patrol.</p><p>They stayed quiet, Tom’s hand bleeding sluggishly into the pocket of his robes.</p><p>Every corridor, once so familiar, sent a shiver of paranoia across Tom’s neck.  The portraits were eerily silent, save for the dull thump of their shared footsteps, and it felt as if a thousand eyes were prowling in the distorted shadows cast by the weakened after-hours torches.</p><p>“You’re good with maps, yeah?”</p><p>“Yeah,” he said dazedly, eyes straining ahead.  “Yeah, I’m bloody good with maps.  What the hell does that—”</p><p>“Don’t keep practicing all this <em>incendio</em> shit.  You start thinking about finding cover.”  Schofield’s measured, quiet voice became more frantic.  “You think of your fucking maps, and you know your fucking exits.  At all times.  Do you understand?”</p><p>“I don’t.  I don’t—What are you telling me, Scho?”</p><p>Will inhaled noisily, hands furiously gripping his hair as his eyes darted around the room.</p><p>“I’m telling you to stop thinking about being a hero, Blake.  You <em>need</em> to live.  You’re just fourteen, and you should’ve been far from this already if your mother hadn’t—"</p><p>Will paused, as if shocked by his outburst.  He looked beseechingly at Tom, who was sure his face was unattractively gaping like a fish.</p><p>“Well, I’ll be fifteen by the end of the month.  I don’t suppose you think that’s enough living, Scho?”</p><p>“Fuck you,” he spat, and they continued their patrol.</p><p>A couple patrols passed without remark, that panic in Scho’s voice pressing claustrophobically overhead as they strained to see beyond their wandlight.</p><p>Then, one patrol, Tom climbed out the portrait to meet Scho at the entrance to the Great Hall when he nearly tripped back into the Common Room.</p><p>Will leaned against the opposite wall, a ghost of a smile from Third Year flickering across his lips.</p><p>Tom stumbled forward, closing the portrait with a graceless slam as he smiled questioningly at Will.</p><p>“What?  I’m not that late, am I?” he asked, pulling back his sleeve to double-check his wristwatch.  “Not even three minutes!”</p><p>“That’s still late, Blake,” Will laughed.</p><p>Tom stood in front of Will, taking in his relaxed posture and smiling face.  It had been so long since he’d had this all to himself.  With what he was sure was a painfully obvious lovestruck expression, he smiled more earnestly at Will.</p><p>“I’ll remember that next time, Scho,” he promised.  “Let’s get started, then.”</p><p>He turned to start walking to the Great Hall and start the patrol when Will suddenly snagged his robe’s sleeve.</p><p>“We don’t have patrol tonight, Tom.”</p><p>“What?  No, of course we have patrol.”  He looked at Will as if he’d lost his mind.  “It’s <em>Thursday</em>.”</p><p>“Traded our patrol with Abbott and Wynch.  We’ve got a night off.”</p><p>“You traded—No!  They’ve got Friday nights, Will!” he said hysterically.  “Fuck!  They’ll make us patrol over Halloween!  I have <em>plans</em>!”</p><p>“Don’t worry about it!” he laughed, eyes glazed and face red.  His hand shifted to grip Tom’s arm for comfortably, and Tom’s heart rate suddenly doubled.  “I’ve got it worked out so I take Abbott’s patrol one week and Wynch’s another week.  Keep your <em>plans</em>,” he giggled.</p><p>Grip still secure over Tom’s wrist, he marched forward into the darkened corridor.  Tom couldn’t help but follow.</p><p>“Okay, a free night off,” Tom huffed as he hurried to match Will’s long-legged pace.  “What’s the occasion, though?”</p><p>At this, Will stopped short and Tom caught a whiff of firewhiskey he’d drank over the summer in Joe’s flat.</p><p>“Uh,” Will paused.  “Marge’s engaged.  We’ve got to celebrate!”</p><p>“Are you drunk, Scho?” Tom asked, poorly concealing an endeared smile.</p><p>“There’s a distinct possibility,” he said loftily.</p><p>He scanned the corridor and distractedly shifted his hand to grip Tom’s upper arm.  Tom spluttered, scrambled to keep his thoughts straight, when he and Will suddenly lurched at the wall.</p><p>Tom braced himself, ready to collide with the unyielding stones when he was suddenly plunged into complete darkness, Will’s heavy breaths ghosting over his neck.</p><p>Tom jumped, holding his wand aloft as he rushed to compose himself.</p><p>“<em>Lumos</em>,” he whispered.  It wouldn’t do to be caught by Hannah and Mervyn on their borrowed patrol.</p><p>A cramped alcove flashed into existence as Will stumbled and sat heavily against the far wall.  With a grin, he produced a half-empty bottle of firewhiskey from his robes.</p><p>“Take a seat, Blake,” he attempted to whisper.</p><p>“We can’t get drunk on a school night, Scho!” he whispered back, hardly decipherable as he was smiling too hard.  This was the best friend he’d missed so dearly on those robotic patrols.</p><p>“Sure, but how often do you find out Margaret’s engaged?”</p><p>“That is the thinnest excuse to get smashed I’ve ever heard, Scho.”</p><p>“Doesn’t have to be good so long as it works,” he laughed.</p><p>Tom slumped heavily against the wall, dangerously close to Will.  He leant his weight on his arm, lined up their legs so they’d press together.</p><p>He wanted to be closer.  He wanted Will to sneak his arm carefully around his back.  But Will’s body stayed heartbreakingly still, his body rigid beside his own.</p><p>“Well, don’t hog it all,” he said jokingly.  “Hand it over.”</p><p>The night passed in a blur of hushed banter and half-hearted wrestling for the bottle.  Tom spun story after nonsensical story, and Will laughed as if each was worth top marks.  Will returned the favor, informing him of hundreds of stupid moments he’d missed between the Forbidden Forest and tonight’s non-patrol.</p><p>They steadfastly ignored anything to do with the war.</p><p>There was a comfortable pause.  Both leaned back, hardly noticing the toll of midnight.  Tom closed his eyes, content as he synchronized his breaths with Will’s.</p><p>Another moment.</p><p>“I missed you,” mumbled Will.</p><p>“I missed you, too.”</p><p>Tom didn’t realize how relaxed Will’s body felt until his posture suddenly went rigid.  He took another deep breath, staring resolutely ahead.</p><p>“I’m not sorry I turned you in.”</p><p>Tom didn’t respond.</p><p>“You don’t belong in a war,” Will continued.  “I wish you would’ve left like you were meant to.”</p><p>Tom thumped his head smartly on the wall behind him, let his hands spasm around the bottle of firewhiskey.</p><p>“Did’ja see how I broke the flowerpot that one time, Scho?”</p><p>Will hummed noncommittally, settling back into the wall.</p><p>“Scared the hell out me, Blake,” he mumbled, eyes closing lazily as the firewhiskey splotched his cheeks a steady pink.  “Don’t do that again.”</p><p>“Why not?” he whined.</p><p>At this, Scho cracked open an eye, glaring irritably at Tom for interrupting his buzz.</p><p>“’Cuz you’re not meant to do that kinda magic.  S’not safe for you to get caught up in all that.”</p><p>“I ever tell you much ‘bout my dad, Scho?” he slurred.</p><p>“Just a little,” Scho grumbled as he neatly snagged the bottle from Tom’s hands to bring to his lips.  Tom watched mesmerized as Will’s throat worked.</p><p>“You remember he’s a muggleborn?”  His arm lurched to reach for the firewhiskey.  Scho took another pull and passed it back.  “Wasn’t much of a wizard ‘cept he was great at blowing shit up.”</p><p>Will giggled, slumped more heavily into Tom’s side.</p><p>“Just like Finni—” he struggled, “Just like Finni--Finniwhatever.”</p><p>“Yeah!” he said excitedly.  “Yeah, just like Finnigan!  He was so good at it, Scho.  Joe talked about it all the time when we were little.</p><p>“But he had this temper, right?  And he wasn’t all that good a wizard to begin with, so when he got mad, it got scary.  Tha’s what Joe tells me.  Mum doesn’t talk about it.  She’s still got this big scar on the back of her neck from this one time dad’s magic hit a window pane.  S’an ugly thing.”</p><p>Scho stopped leaning so heavily on Tom, and the castle’s chill sunk into his robes.  He looked up and saw that laser focus he’d been grasping for since First Year.</p><p>“Y’know,” he started quietly.  “When we was little, Joe and I, we’d always harvest our mum’s cherry trees.  Yeah?  You remember?</p><p>“We was so little, Scho, this one time.  It was so hot out, and Joe was picking berries.  He was so much faster than me, but he wasn’t being mean about it.  But I got so mad, Scho.  I got so, so mad because I couldn’t keep up, and—”</p><p>Tom shook his head, cast his eyes away from Will’s searching stare.  It wouldn’t do to get worked up now.</p><p>“I didn’t have any magic when I was real little, not like Joe.  Joe could make shit float when he was in the cradle.  That’s what Mum says.  She’d turn around one minute, and the next, Myrtle would be flying circles in the air like a mobile.  Joe was always so <em>good</em>.</p><p>“I couldn’t do any of that.  Dad figured I was a muggle, like Mum.”</p><p>At this, Will made an aborted noise, like was about to interject, but Tom wasn’t finished yet.  He plowed on.</p><p>“I never got treated any different, but I’d get so mad when I’d see Joe just doing all this accidental magic.  Few times, I would tie toys to a string and make Mum watch me pull them to me, pretending to do magic like Joe could.  I just never felt good enough, and I’d get so mad.  Mum felt bad.  Told Joe to try stopping using magic around me.  He got pretty good at controlling it.  But I still knew he had magic, and I didn’t.”</p><p>“So’s that day when Joe and I was picking cherries, I watched him out the corner of my eye the whole time.  I knew he wasn’t using magic, not even a bit.  He was holding onto the branch, like a muggle, and grabbing all the cherries, like a muggle.  But he was still better than me.  He must’ve had twice as many cherry buckets full.  I got so mad, and I was so hot, and we’d been outside for hours, and I was just a kid, Scho.  I was just a kid.”</p><p>Suddenly, Tom couldn’t stand not looking at Will as this story spilled from his lips.  He needed to see what he thought.  He couldn’t just sit there, reciting this to the upper-right corner of an especially interesting brick across the alcove.</p><p>Will and his puppy blue eyes stared back with a small wrinkle between his brows.  His leg pulled away as he shifted into a crouch.  That rush of cold air, getting out of Will’s space, Tom felt that drunken haze that wasn’t entirely firewhiskey begin to clear.  Tom knew he’d been rambling too much.  This was a far cry from his usual storytelling.  Shit quality, time to get to the main point.</p><p>“I got out my tree to count how many buckets Joe’d already filled.  All’s I remember is, he had a lot more buckets than I did.  He was talking from his tree, just laughing and filling another bucket.  I walked up to his tree and put my hands on it like I was goin’ to climb it.  I don’t know what I was going to do when I climbed up next to Joe, but that’s when my magic finally kicked in, Scho.</p><p>“One second, the tree was solid, the next, the trunk was split in half and Joe was caught in all the branches, tangled up on the ground and yowling like you wouldn’t believe.  Mum was picking out splinters for days and all his cherry buckets got crushed.”</p><p>Tom’s breath hitched, and he mustered a smile for Will as he pushed himself from the wall and stumbled upright.</p><p>Taking another swig from the bottle, he slurred, “My magic is good for breaking shit, Scho, just like my dad, and he was a hero when he died.  Might as well do what I’m good at ‘fore I hurt someone I’m not meant to.”</p><p>They didn’t talk about it next patrol.  Or the next.  Or any patrol after that, but Scho at least stopped trying to convince Tom to take cover.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>i can't decide whether to include the battle of hogwarts.  lmk what you think</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Ghosts All Around</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sorry for the late update!  I was looking at my outline, and I ended up deciding I needed an extra chapter.  Hopefully, I'll add the last chapter by Monday!</p><p>Edit: reread for grammar.  no beta so we vibin</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>William Schofield, Eighth Year Ravenclaw and former Prefect, lived as if he was still in the Battle of Hogwarts.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Sixth Year Gryffindor Prefect, wasn’t far behind.</em>
</p><hr/><p>May was fast approaching, and that chill which Hogwarts had ignored all year was becoming more and more difficult to shake off.</p><p>Inside the castle, the stones had been carefully rebricked, and each windowpane had been replaced.  Portraits were settled back onto their hooks, and blood had been scraped from the ceiling.  Certain corridors were avoided now.  Even loitering too long in the Great Hall sent a chill of memory down each student’s spine.</p><p>Every blind corner gripped icily at Tom’s skin.  Hogwarts’ ghosts, once regarded as morbid mascots of the castle, suddenly inspired an incomparable dread.  They weren’t centuries-old spirits, anymore.  Now, they were gut-wrenchingly familiar.</p><p>Specters of faintly recognizable students, so afraid to die that they condemned themselves to eternal observation of the living, floated listlessly through the odd corridor.  Heads were misshapen, odd limbs missing completely.  Silvery blood glittered morbidly as it forevermore saturated their ragged robes.  Some mustered smiles as Tom passed by.  Most stared vacantly at repaired walls, probably haunting the exact spaces where they died.</p><p>Professors had tried containing them to an abandoned classroom with complicated wards, but that fear of oblivion which had made them ghosts already drove them to scrabble manically at the wards so that jailbreaks became monthly nightmares for every living student.  Not many professors had the heart to lock ghostly children back into a magicked hell.  The abandoned classroom became abandoned once more, but the dregs of broken wards and the memories of ear-splitting, frightened shrieks kept students away altogether.</p><p>Honestly, Tom thought, it wasn’t all that bad after a little getting used to.</p><p>Courses resumed with mind numbingly boring assignments.  Far-fetched rumors trickled between classes and houses.  The Common Room’s hearth remained inviting, no matter the season.</p><p>First Year students, especially the muggleborns, rushed through the hallways, giggling and unwittingly injecting life back into spaces where walls had crumbled, screams had echoed and hands had scrabbled uselessly.</p><p>Time barreled forward, regardless of how often Tom looked back.</p><p>He could ignore that creeping feeling of terror as he slipped into rusted routines he dimly remembered before the war, but that manufactured calm crumbled at the first hint of darkness.</p><p>While days were lived out in relative normalcy, there was no denying a remnant of panic that clung stubbornly to Gryffindor’s Sixth Year boys’ dormitory.</p><p>The room, in all of Hogwarts’ history, had never been so neat.  Their trunks, nicked and scuffed from careless rides on the Hogwarts Express, remained fully packed beneath their beds alongside their carefully stacked textbooks and quills.  At the first sight of trouble, they’d be ready to flee.</p><p>The large windows looking out onto the grounds were barricaded.  No light made its way into the dorm thanks to the thick fabric plastered with a strong sticking charm to the window.  Tom had poked fun at Arthur along with Henry for the floral pattern of his mother’s quilts, but they understood.  If there wasn’t any light coming in from the window, there wasn’t any light going out.  No faceless enemy could spy on their restless sleep.</p><p>The curtains around the bedposts went unused by an unspoken agreement.  Sacrificing privacy was worth the security derived from quick scans of the dorm.</p><p>As the white noise of tired chatter and rustling sheets would fade into calm, measured breaths, the vacant beds to Tom’s left seemed to drain all the light out of the dorm.</p><p>He’d screw his eyes shut so that explosions of color would bloom behind his eyes, holding haunting images of vacant eyes and unnaturally still bodies at bay.  Silently, his hand would shift beneath his pillow to find the reassuring outline of his wand, and he’d fall into an uneasy sleep.</p><p>Some nights, he’d be so exhausted from Arithmancy exams and socializing that he’d scarcely close his eyes at eleven and startle awake at six.  Most nights, he’d fall asleep at midnight and jerk back awake at four, heart pounding, legs twisted in his sheets and wand held wildly overhead.</p><p>This was one of those nights.</p><p>Tom ran across the grounds, instinctively avoiding divots he’d tripped over since Third Year, wand swinging wildly as his arms pumped with exertion.</p><p>He chanced a glance behind him, swearing loudly as he saw a Death Eater following closely behind.</p><p>An icy chill suddenly raced up his leg, and he distantly realized he’d stepped into the lake.  He tugged his leg free of the silt with a wet pop and nearly fell as he rushed out the water to the safety of a nearby bush.</p><p>The Death Eater’s loud footfalls and even louder gasps for air grew louder, and Tom knew he didn’t have much time before he was found.</p><p>The bush rustled as he struggled to disentangle himself from its clinging branches, and he hissed as he felt a branch scratch deeply from his cheek to his ear.  A vice grip snapped onto Tom’s elbow as the Death Eater finally found him and dragged him back out into the open.</p><p>Tom struggled, tears frustratingly gathering in the corners of his eyes as he was thrown to the dirt beneath him, and his head exploded with a ringing pain.  He looked wildly around and dizzily saw three pairs of dirtied boots circling around him.  With a gargled groan, he looked up, and his heart nearly stopped.</p><p>Death Eaters towered above him, masks grinning manically as the hems of their robes congealed with blood and mud.  Tom scrambled backwards, elbows frantically finding purchase on the dried, dead grass beneath him.</p><p>A glint of an eye, a flick of a gnarled wand, a curse.</p><p>Panic froze his joints as he flinched.  Knives, all over his body, his eyes, his tongue, his hip, his index finger, burned and he screamed helplessly, hoarsely.  The battle had been going on for hours.  It was a miracle he'd lasted this long.</p><p>The curse let up and he gasped for air.  His knuckles clutched assuredly around his wand, and before the next dreaded incantation could be uttered, he pointed haphazardly at the dried grass beneath their feet and screamed his own.</p><p>Fire licked up their robes, blazing hot for one brief moment, and Tom panicked that he’d set himself on fire, too, until a blinding pain tore across his stomach.</p><p>With shaking hands, he looked down and saw blood spurting in waves down to the dried brown dirt.</p><p>Wide puppy blue eyes suddenly overtook his vision of red and brown, and Tom distantly recognized Will as he screamed for him to <em>get up, get up, get up!</em></p><p>His arms were wrenched above his head, and his stomach felt like it was ripping in two, and Tom screamed and screamed and screamed and he hardly realized his hands were back in place, gingerly collecting blood as it poured onto the dirt below him.</p><p>His head lolled to the side and he saw Will’s eyes, lifeless, staring straight back at him.  Blackened grass stained his cheek, and the smell of burnt flesh suddenly made Tom gag—</p><p>Until he woke up with a hoarse scream.</p><p>Empty beds sat menacingly vacant beneath the quilted windows.  Henry breathed quietly to this right, and Arthur chattered incoherently from the other end of the room.</p><p>Tom sat up shakily and unwrapped the sweat dampened sheets from his calves, pressing his other hand gingerly to the tender scar on his midsection.  He laid back with a huff and feigned sleep as Henry woke hours later with a muffled scream.</p><p>The sun finally began to dully shine through a frayed hole in the windows’ makeshift curtain, and Tom exhaustedly rolled out of bed to wrestle out of his sleep clothes and into his school robes.</p><p>Tiredly, he waited for Arthur and Henry to dress also and stepped out onto the staircase.  They made their way to the Great Hall and sat in companionable silence as they wolfed down their breakfasts.</p><p>Tom’s eyes dragged across the Hall until he found Will hunched reservedly at Ravenclaw’s table, and Tom could suddenly breathe easier.</p><p>“Can’t believe it’s only Wednesday,” Tom groaned, a hint of a smile coloring his voice.  “It feels like a Thursday, <em>at least</em>.”</p><p>Arthur and Henry agreed tiredly and breakfast resumed with aimless banter.</p><p>The day passed without fanfare, aside from a nice letter from his mum at lunch, and Tom soon found himself back in his dorm bracing for rounds.</p><p>Penelope Padgett had found him at dinner with a grim smile.  Damian Perriss had been hit with an errant spell during Transfiguration and was confined to the infirmary for the next two days, or at least until his new antlers would dissolve.  Unless he found a replacement, Penelope had said, he’d be stuck doing rounds alone.</p><p>Tom’s gaze skittered unwillingly to Will’s table, but he quickly talked himself out of asking him to join him on rounds.  Will hadn’t said as much, but Tom suspected he’d declined being an Eighth-Year prefect because he couldn’t handle the dungeons at night anymore.  Tom could hardly blame him.</p><p>He hadn’t seen it himself, but Tom had heard Will’d left the dungeon with a broken wand and two dead Death Eaters behind him.</p><p>When he didn't dream of fire and blood, whispers of duels and strangling often featured in his nightmares.</p><p>Dinner passed, and Tom couldn’t find a replacement.  Something of his panic must’ve slipped onto his face because from across the Hall, Will looked at him questioningly.  Tom shot back a reassuring smile until he nodded, apparently satisfied.</p><p>All the students scrambled back to their Houses, and Tom sat nervously in the Common Room as he watched the sun creep closer and closer to the tree line.</p><p>With a deep breath, he stepped outside the portrait hole with his wand in hand and badge glinting dully on his chest.  Tom slowly made his way around the castle, starting at the Great Hall, all the while singing quietly to himself.</p><p>Having completed his patrol of the first floor, Tom darted quickly up the Floating Staircase, avoiding the trick stair and resolutely shaking the memory of debris and blood splattered along the railing from his vision.  He rounded the corner, breathing heavily, when he nearly walked through Charlie March.</p><p>“Oh, my God!” Tom screamed.</p><p>Charlie’s head turned vacantly to Tom as he braced his hands on his knees.  A tear in his robe’s sleeve revealed a ghastly wound bleeding sluggishly.  Silvery blood ran dripped lazily from his lax pinky finger as he lifted his arm in a half-hearted greeting.</p><p>Transparent eyes still trained on Tom’s, Charlie slipped soundlessly into the corridor wall, and Tom let out an ugly, wet cry as he looked around the hallway for more ghosts.  Seeing none, he walked down the corridor with his wand held shakily in front of him.</p><p>He completed his patrol of the upper floors with little more than an odd reflection of his wandlight on a framed portrait, and he nearly collapsed in front of Ravenclaw Tower to rest.</p><p>The world around him had narrowed.  He could hardly see out of his peripherals from his growing panic, and he distantly heard himself breathing as if he were sucking from a straw.</p><p>On shaking legs, he made his way back to the staircase to descend into the dungeons.</p><p>He put this off for a reason.  Every time.</p><p>His shoulder brushed against the damp walls, sending a shiver of cold awareness through him as he made his way past the Potions classroom.  His eyes darted quickly between flickering shadows, heartrate spiking with each false alarm.</p><p>He barreled through the dungeon, hoping to <em>Merlin</em> he wouldn’t have to see him, and he was nearly done until—</p><p>“MACKENZIE!”</p><p>Tom froze, and a desperate whimper slipped past his lips.  He started sprinting.</p><p>“MACKENZIE!”</p><p>One turn left, and he’d make it to the stairs.  He’d be done.  He wouldn’t have to come back.</p><p>“KENZIE, HELP!”</p><p>The scream sent him careening into the wall, and shivers raced up his spine.  Searing pain stabbed into his abdomen.  His scar was flaring to life.</p><p>He was here.</p><p>Joe came flying out of the wall with a silvery glow.  His ears were bleeding steadily, and he held his mangled arm protectively to his chest.  He fell soundlessly against the opposite wall, glaring unseeingly at the end of the corridor.</p><p>“MACKENZIE!”</p><p>“Joe,” Tom cried.  He knew this was useless.  “Joe, just go away.  I can’t help.”</p><p>“MACKENZIE!” he screamed hoarsely as silvery blood bubbled from his throat.  Joe looked around desperately and finally, horrifically saw Tom.</p><p>“Tommy?” he wheezed.  “Tom?  I need help.  Get help.  Get—”</p><p>Joe seized, body shaking uncontrollably, and his translucent body fell through the floor and into the castle’s foundation.</p><p>The corridor was suddenly, awfully silent, aside from Tom’s uneven sobs.</p><p>Joe had died afraid.  Alone.  And Tom had been out in the forest, hiding shaking First and Second Years in tree roots, just playing hero and stumbling onto the grounds to set shit on fire.  He’d been terrified for Will, but he’d never considered that Joe was in so much more danger.</p><p>
  <em>Joe wasn’t supposed to die.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>He wasn’t supposed to.</em>
</p><p>Tom fell to his side and heaved.  He stared uncomprehendingly at the vomit and spittle dribbling from his lips and mechanically dragged his sleeve across his mouth.</p><p>He stood shakily, gripping at the grooves in the wall for support.  Legs shaking uncontrollably, he stumbled out of the dungeons and made his way back to the Floating Staircase.  He narrowly missed the trick stair and looked up to find himself back in front of Ravenclaw Tower.</p><p>He’d scarcely sat across from the door when it swung open.</p><p>Will stepped out, frenziedly pulling at his robes until he spotted Tom slumped dazedly against the corridor wall.</p><p>“Tom?”</p><p>He rushed forward, crouching in front of him and taking in the tear tracks drying messily down his face.  His eyes were wild, hands reaching out to pat frantically down Tom’s arms.</p><p>“Are you alright?” he breathed.</p><p>“It’s—I’m sorry, Scho.  I didn’t mean to scare you.”</p><p>“Where—Where’s Perriss?  He should be with you.  Why are you alone?”</p><p>“Transfiguration accident.”  He paused, “Cyril has an Arithmancy exam tomorrow, and Flack already had plans with Cassie so nobody else could do rounds.”  His voice cracked.  “With me.  So I was alone.  All night.”</p><p>“Fuck.  You went into the dungeons?”</p><p>Tom didn’t respond.</p><p>“Merlin, Tom,” he breathed.  Will shifted his weight and sat heavily next to Tom so that their legs, hips and arms were pressed together tightly.  Tom thought briefly, manically how much nicer it would be if Will had another bottle of firewhiskey, like that time when Joe was training owlets and war wasn't a sure thing and Joe was <em>alive, alive, alive</em>.</p><p>Tom leaned heavily into Will’s side.</p><p>“Not—” he cleared his throat.  “Not exactly my best night.”</p><p>They sat in silence, both working to calm their breathing.  Humiliated, Tom wiped at his eyes.  His hands came away wet.</p><p>“Didn’t sleep much last night, either,” Tom said wobbly.</p><p>Will didn’t respond, just closed his eyes as he ground his head firmly into the wall behind him.  An indeterminate time passed as Tom’s breathing finally reaching something approximating normalcy.</p><p>“Don’t think anyone’s sleeping much,” Will finally muttered, hands spasming in his lap.</p><p>Tom watched Will's long fingers.  He wanted to grab one of his hands and interlace their fingers, stop the shaking, maybe see how they'd fit together.</p><p>“You want to sleep here, tonight?”</p><p>Tom thought immediately of the hushed sanctuary of Ravenclaw's Eighth Year dormitory.  The windows were blanketed, the trunks were packed, the bed curtains were opened and beds were notably empty, but it was so, so, so much better than Gryffindor.</p><p>Because Will slept there, breathing evenly and sleeping deeply.  Because when he slept, he'd plaster himself to Tom's back and throw a protective arm around his front.  Because there were no ghosts that far away from the dungeon.</p><p>Tom stood wordlessly.  Will hardly had to ask.  He slept here every Wednesday night, regardless.</p><p>Rubbing the dried tears from his eyes, Tom held out his hand to Will, silently offering to help him up.</p><p>Will opened his eyes with a tired smile and reached up.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I didn't include anything directly from the Battle, sorry!  I kinda wanted to focus on the aftermath (nearly a year later).</p><p>But here's what happened:<br/>- Joe hid kids in the Forest (successfully) and came out to fight on the grounds.  He got hit with a curse that shredded up his stomach, but only after he'd set a lot of grass on fire to hopefully burn Death Eaters alive.  Will found him in the Great Hall afterwards and freaked.<br/>- Will got roped into an attack effort coordinated by Mackenzie in the dungeons.  Joe, Will and a few other witches/wizards went down, but Mackenzie miscalculated and sent them into a trap.  Will was the only survivor.  He strangled a young Death Eater because he couldn't bring himself to use the killing curse and then escaped a duel with another Death Eater.  He broke his wand from taking a corner too fast.<br/>- Joe ended up being left for dead in the dungeon.  While Joe was obviously a Gryffindor, he still feared death.  He didn't want to leave his life behind and got caught into this never-ending time loop where he keeps dying.  Oof</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Minefield</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>did i add another chapter?  yes.<br/>do i hate myself?  yes.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, Fifth Year Gryffindor Prefect, mourned his brother.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>William Schofield, Seventh Year Ravenclaw, could hardly breathe.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Will did his utmost to forget the Battle of Hogwarts.</p><p>The day had grinded by in gruesome detail.</p><p>The war had quietly wound its way into everyone of Will’s synapses.  He could hardly feel as a cold numbness drained the world of color and left him with a simmering panic.</p><p>Early in May, he woke from a fitful sleep with a hiss as he rubbed at his jaw.  His teeth ached sharply from clenching his mouth so tightly, and he stumbled stiffly down the dormitory staircase.</p><p>Morbidly, he found himself memorizing every face he saw, subconsciously thinking it may be the last time he saw his housemates alive.  His eye had developed a permanent twitch, and he flinched at the loud, nervous chatter bouncing around the airy Common Room.</p><p>He stuffed his shaking hands in his pockets and felt the reassuring weight of his wand as he inhaled sharply through his nose and hardly a day later, found himself stumbling into the Great Hall, hoping against hope he wasn’t the only one left.</p><p>Sharon was kneeling beside Margaret, daubing a stained towel to her bleeding shin.  Margaret grimaced and looked forward resolutely, casting her eyes about the Hall so that she couldn’t watch Sharon.</p><p>Margaret had always hated blood, especially her own.</p><p>Margaret’s searching gaze stuttered as she spotted Will limping haltingly to their spot, and she stood up with a wince.  Sharon made a tutting noise, reaching to pull Margaret back into her seat.</p><p>“Will!” Margaret screamed.  Sharon nearly fell over in her haste to spot him as he made the last agonizing steps toward them.  “Will!  Thank Merlin!”</p><p>Margaret lunged at Will’s shoulders while Sharon grabbed desperately at his waist.  Relieved tears burned hotly down Will’s face, and his arms slowly reached out to grip their hair and pull them into his chest.</p><p>“You’re both okay?” he whispered.</p><p>“We’re fine,” Sharon mumbled into his bloodied robes.</p><p>Margaret pulled back and searched Will’s face as her hands felt the matted blood at the nape of his neck.  Something in Will’s expression must have warned her against talking, so she softly tilted his head down to kiss his forehead.</p><p>He pulled his sisters closer, and his next breath sounded dangerously close to a sob, so he promptly disentangled himself.</p><p>Sharon’s eyes were distinctly redder, and Margaret was shifting wincingly onto her left leg, but they were whole.  They were alive.</p><p>He’d been terrified one of his sisters would join the neatly arranged corpses laid out on the tables.</p><p>Sharon huffed, and Margaret lowered herself steadily back onto her bench.  Will took up his post over Sharon’s shoulder, silently watching to make sure that the blood was wiped properly from Margaret’s leg until a familiar voice called out.</p><p>“Schofield!”  Margaret and Sharon looked up with Will to see Buchanan walking quickly to their loose circle.  “Any of you up for a fight?  Just received a message from You-Know-Who,” he said plainly.  “He’s holed up in the forest with all his Death Eaters, so Kingsley’s—"</p><p>That dull ringing amplified and overtook all his senses.  His vision swam with panic, and he nearly fell into Sharon as he scrabbled for support against the nearby table.</p><p>He looked down to see an ashen, nameless body laid across the tabletop in a row beside three more and felt bile rise in his throat.</p><p>The forest.</p><p>He should have been safe in the forest.</p><p>Hardly anyone ventured in there.</p><p>His babysitting assignment should have kept him far from the fighting.</p><p>A waving hand crept cautiously into his line of vision.</p><p>“Schofield?  Schofield, you listening, mate?” Buchanan asked.</p><p>“Where?”  No sound came out.  “Where’s Blake?”</p><p>Buchanan eyes widened alarmedly, hands reaching out to steady his classmate, as Will’s voice rose frantically.  Sharon let out a strangled noise as if she was about to continue crying.</p><p>“Have you seen Tom?  Thomas Blake?”</p><p>Buchanan’s face fell as his arm came up to pat hollowly across his back.</p><p>“I’ll ask around, Will.”</p><p>Sharon leaned into his leg searching for quiet reassurance, and Will’s hand landed heavily on her shoulder.  Margaret tucked her injured leg under the bench as she gripped Sharon’s hand and smiled tiredly at Buchanan as he walked away.</p><p>She hushed Sharon as a quiet whimper escaped her tightly drawn lips and looked up at Will.</p><p>“Today’s almost over,” she said quietly.  “Just a few hours more, I promise.”</p><p>Will hated that battle.  Hated the sounds Joe had made on the other side of the impossibly thick door as he was dying on the dungeon floor, praying for help.</p><p>Hated that he couldn’t stutter out <em>avada kedavra</em>, hated that he’d strangled Baumer, hated that he’d watched the frightened look in his eye drain in synch with Joe’s gurgling gasps for breath.</p><p>Hated that Sharon had screamed when she found Tom lying gray and unconscious on the floor of the Great Hall, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.</p><p>Hated that deep scratch slashing the side of his baby face.  Hated that his leg was wet as if he had darted after an errant parchment Will had been sure would fall into the lake.  Hated the burns on his blackened fingertips.  Hated hearing that the grounds were scorched and littered with charred Death Eaters.  Hated that he’d listened to Joe die screaming for help, for his brother, for fucking Mackenzie to call off the attack.  Hated, hated, <em>hated</em> it.</p><p>The train station was deadly silent as all of Hogwarts loaded their trunks, looking furtively over their shoulders at even the slightest disturbance that didn’t register as poorly concealed sobs.  For once, Sharon didn’t make a fuss as Will clumsily fitted her trunk into the carriage.  She—like the rest of the school—was too busy watching the macabre line of stretchers levitating alongside hastily fashioned coffins.</p><p>Madame Pomfrey, sleepless and pale, fluttered nervously between injured students, adjusting listless arms and legs to fit more securely as they entered a designated train car.  Students stood a uniform ten paces back, eyes wide and minds lost in a haze of flashing spells.  It seemed that no one was willing to confront their brush with death by hovering over mangled friends.</p><p>None more so than Will Schofield.</p><p>Sharon tugged insistently at the sleeve of his robe, but he gripped resolutely at the cold metal of the carriage bar.  Madame Pomfrey’s dull murmurs bounced around his ears, adding to the cacophony of robes swishing and scuffled footsteps.  Such inconsequential sounds suddenly became his whole universe as he stared unseeingly at his distorted reflection in the rail.  Sharon gave up tugging at his robe as the last coffin made its way onto a train car, and she fell into her seat with a muted cry.</p><p>In normal circumstances, she’d shoo him away from her train compartment and usher in a waiting gaggle of Ravenclaw dormmates to fill the empty booths.  In normal circumstances, Tom would appear outside the compartment glass with a grin and a pilfered pack of cigarettes he’d snagged from patrol because he liked the idea of acting older than he ought to.  In normal circumstances, Will would walk out Sharon’s compartment without a second glance, eyes trained firmly on Tom and that smile which beckoned more and more mischief each year.  In normal circumstances, he’d step out the compartment and brace himself for Tom’s arm landing heavily across his back as he’d drag him away from his sisters friends and their poorly concealed chatter about how lucky Sharon was to have a fit older brother who was friends with <em>Tom Blake.  And don’t you remember how proper fit Joe Blake is?  You reckon Tom’ll look like that next term?</em></p><p>Will squeezed the bar one last time and sat carefully beside his sister.  These were not normal circumstances.  Tom was leaving Hogwarts on a stretcher, and Joe was leaving in a coffin.  Sharon’s dormmates were nowhere to be seen, and Sharon’s hand had shifted to clutch at Will’s robe pocket.</p><p>The train lurched to a start, and Will pressed his forehead to the cool glass of the window, watching as Hogwarts castle and its lingering cloud of smoke gave way to train tracks and gnarled trees.</p><p>Sharon didn’t mention the tremor in his shoulder, and Will didn’t move to push her to the opposite corner of the compartment.</p><p>King’s Cross was a mess of panicked searching and relieved cries.  Will tiredly blinked as the train slowed, and he shook Sharon’s drooling face free of his shoulder.  With a grimace, he reached up to pat at his robes.  Sharon slumped over on the booth, curling into a ball beneath the window.</p><p>“Lazy,” muttered as he braced his knees against the booth and reached up for his trunk.  “Share, c’mon.  Grab your shit.”</p><p>Sharon huffed out an annoyed sigh and rolled awkwardly so that her back was turned to Will.</p><p>“You get it.  S’heavy,” she slurred.</p><p>Will wrestled his trunk from the carriage and let it drop to the floor with a thud.  Sharon flipped onto her back and dramatically threw her arm over her face to block out the light from the window.</p><p>“Fuck off,” he huffed and bent to pick up his trunk.  He hobbled over to the compartment door and jostled his hip against the handle until it slid open.  “See you outside, then.”</p><p>“No, wait!” Sharon shrieked as she shot up from the booth.  With a grunt, she jimmied her trunk free of the carriage and nearly fell into Will as he waited with a deep frown.  Students rushed down the train car with excited murmurs, necks craning to look out passing windows for their families.  “Merlin, you’re such an arse,” she huffed as she muscled past Will and into the growing crowd of students rushing to get off the train.</p><p>Will grumbled behind her and pointedly kicked at her trunk dragging heavily on the carpet.</p><p>They finally made their way to the doorway and Will nearly tripped over Sharon’s trunk.  A faceless Third Year behind him pushed forward impatiently, nearly toppling Will into Sharon’s stock still form.  She had frozen, hands coming up to cover her mouth, and Will immediately reached into his robes for his wand, looking for the threat.</p><p>Dad stepped into the doorway, wrapping a shaking arm around Sharon’s back and grasping at her absurdly heavy trunk.  Will scrambled to hop off the train after them, and his shoes scarcely hit the concrete when Dad broke from Sharon to wrap Will in a bearhug that nearly stole his breath.</p><p>Dad’s arms loosened for a moment, and Will discretely swiped at his burning face while Dad placed a quick kiss on Sharon’s forehead.</p><p>“You both alright?” he asked gruffly.  Will blinked rapidly, taking in his father’s ragged appearance.  His thinning hair stood on end, and the perpetual bags under his eyes had deepened to a startling purple.  His robes were hopelessly wrinkled, and with a quick glance down, Will confirmed that his socks were mismatched.</p><p>Sharon cleared her throat.</p><p>“We’re okay, Dad.”  She dragged her forearm quickly under her nose and mustered a toothless smile.  “Where’s Mum and Peg?”</p><p>“Oh, they’re waiting by the wall.  Mum didn’t want Peg moving her leg too much.”  Sharon and Will turned to look out over the crowd, and Dad muttered a soft <em>wingardium leviosa</em> over both their trunks.  “C’mon, stay close.”</p><p>Will spotted Margaret first, fidgeting against the wall nearest the barrier.  Her lips were drawn into a severe line as she scanned the crowd for Will, Sharon and Dad.  Her hair hung limply at her shoulders, and Mum was distractedly poking her wand at the stark white bandages at Margaret’s shin.  Margaret’s eyes suddenly snapped to his, and Will watched as she patted impatiently at Mum’s arm.</p><p>Mum, equally rumpled as Dad, came rushing over with an inhuman scream of relief.  She tucked her wand haphazardly into her knotted hair and pushed past Dad to pull Will and Sharon into her startlingly bony frame.</p><p>Will ducked his head to push into the crook of her neck and allowed himself a hiccupped cry.</p><p>“Oh, my babies,” Mum soothed.  “I’m so, so sorry.”  She gripped them impossibly tighter.  “Thank Merlin you’re okay.  I love you both so much.  So, so, so much,” she repeated.</p><p>Will felt Sharon pull away with a teary and reassuring, “We’re okay, Mum.”</p><p>Will pressed his face harder into Mum’s shoulder and blindly reached his other arm to grip at Dad’s arm.</p><p>Margaret hobbled over to loop an arm around Sharon.</p><p>A few moments passed, and Dad cleared his throat.</p><p>“Right, Mum’s got an overnight shift starting at seven.  You two go and say goodbye to your friends before we get going.  Twenty minutes?”</p><p>Sharon nodded, patting hastily at her reddened face.  She took a deep breath and turned to walk into the mess of families.  Over her shoulder she called, “Yeah, we’ll meet you back here in thirty.”</p><p>“I said twenty!” Dad called back.  “Your mother made meatloaf!”</p><p>Sharon glanced back halfheartedly, pointing at her ear as if she didn’t hear Dad, and Will huffed out an annoyed sigh.</p><p>“Will?” Mum asked.  “You want me to come with you?”</p><p>“No,” he breathed, and his voice cracked embarrassingly.  “No, I’ll just—I’m gonna go find Sharon.”</p><p>Dad nodded and pulled Will into another rib crushing hug.</p><p>“Alright, we love you,” he said softly.</p><p>Mum looked concernedly at Will over Dad’s shoulder and gave him a sympathetic smile while Margaret looked boredly around the platform for a familiar family.</p><p>Will disentangled himself from Dad and trailed after Sharon as she shouldered her way through the crowd.  Sharon made her way back to the train and moved to catch one of her dormmates’ attention.</p><p>Will called out, “Share!”</p><p>Sharon whipped around, braid snapping against her chin.</p><p>“Will?  What’re you—”</p><p>“I just—”  He looked pleadingly between Sharon and the medical car and Sharon’s eyes widened with understanding.  “I can’t—I can’t do this right now.”  He winced to himself as his voice cracked embarrassingly.  “I’m just going to apparate home.  Could you tell Mum?”</p><p>“Yeah,” she said, searching his face.  “Yeah, sure.  You’ll be okay?”</p><p>“I’m fine,” he snapped, breathing heavily and stuffing his shaking hands into his pockets.  “I’ll see you in half an hour.  Okay?”</p><p>She continued looking searchingly at Will, and slowly responded, “Okay.”</p><p>“Right,” he muttered and made his way to a relatively empty patch of concrete.  He took out his wand, eyes trained on the winding, somber line of parents waiting at the medical car.</p><p>A hard weight settled in his stomach as he saw an unmarked coffin quietly shuttled off the train, and with a pop an entirely different nausea knotted his chest as he suddenly stood in a familiar foyer.</p><p>Winter robes hung haphazardly from the coat rack.  Soft evening light highlighted dust particles floating lazily between the banister’s chipped white spindles.  Pock marks littered the wooden floor from years of childish stomping up and down the staircase.  A stubborn portrait of Margaret hung slightly off-center beside a row of perfectly aligned family pictures, and a familiar orange cat came yowling around the corner to rub against Will’s legs.</p><p>Will was home, and he nearly collapsed from the weight of it.</p><p>The first week passed in a blur of staring blankly at his bedroom ceiling and absentmindedly petting Bludger as he muscled his way into Will’s bed.  Mum and Dad moved like zombies through the house between hospital shifts, and Sharon seemed to have rediscovered her love of muggle boy bands.  (Coincidentally, Will had also rediscovered his love of opening Sharon’s door to jinx her wall the exact shade of yellow he pissed out during his last bathroom break, and Margaret suddenly started camping in the hallway to strongarm Will back into his room.)</p><p>There were moments when they could act as if the battle hadn’t happened, and there were moments when they couldn’t.</p><p>Will was gazing at his bedroom ceiling when a persistent tap at the window sent him tumbling nervously to the floor.  He looked up to see Duke perched heavily on his windowsill, and that panic amplified tenfold.</p><p>He threw his window open to a flurry of feathers and demanding squawks as Bludger hissed angrily at the intrusion from the top of his dresser.  Will looked around frantically for the stash of treats he’d kept expressly for the temperamental owl and shoved them all at Duke as he reached nervously for the letter secured to his leg.</p><p>Duke pecked happily at his bounty while Bludger fled the room, and Will sunk into his desk chair, letter unopened in his shaking hands.  The handwriting was unfamiliar, and his stomach plummeted.</p><p>Hundreds of possibilities flooded through his mind.  Tom could have contracted an infection.  He could have fallen out of bed and split open his wound.  He could have tried climbing a fucking cherry tree and been struck by lightning.</p><p>A knock at the door startled him back to reality.</p><p>“Dumbass?” Sharon called.  “Everything okay in there?”</p><p>Will rolled his eyes and settled more comfortably into his chair.</p><p>“Fuck off!”</p><p>“Jesus,” she spat, voice becoming muffled as she stomped back to her room.  “Did you just piss yourself and then drink it?”</p><p>Suddenly, the telltale ruckus of Margaret rounding the stairs sent Will’s forehead to his desktop.</p><p>“Sharon!” Margaret yelled.  “How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet?  You’re not the only one in this house, and I can hardly concentrate downstairs when you—”</p><p>“Oh, my God!  Again, Peg?  You’re going to talk to me about noise when you—”</p><p>Will groaned and looked at the letter resting innocently on the floor.  He leaned down to snag it between his middle and index finger, consciously drowning out the sound of Sharon and Margaret’s typical rows.</p><p>Sitting back with a sigh, he closed his eyes and tentatively slid his finger under the seal of the envelope.  Opening his eyes with a grimace, he drew out the contents of the letter.</p><p>And promptly sprinted to the toilet to vomit.</p><p>An unmoving picture of Joe Blake, smiling and alive and whole, stared out from the paper and cordially invited him to celebrate his life.  On the back, Tom’s familiar handwriting—shaky and uneven and splotchy but undoubtably his—wrote:</p><p>
  <em>Hey Will,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know you probably need more time on your own, but I really hope you can come.  Joe <strike>likes</strike> liked you well enough.  It’ll be a muggle service, so if you can come (and you don’t have to if you don’t want to), try and wear a black muggle suit, I guess.  I don’t know.  Haven’t been to a funeral before.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Sorry.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Tom</em>
</p><p>So that’s how Will found himself shuffling down the carpeted aisle of some unfamiliar Essex church between Adam Atkins and some unfamiliar muggle family toting a fussy baby in a portable carrier.  The baby looked brand new, splotchy fists coiled tightly around a soft fleece blanket as its face crumpled in preparation for a good scream.  Will envied it.</p><p>With every step toward the altar, Will felt his breath be punched out of his chest.</p><p>How do you properly view a body?</p><p>Will stuffed his shaking hands into his trouser pockets, feeling for the grounding weight of his wand, and shifted his eyes up to the crucifix suspended from the ceiling.  Light filtered unseasonably bright through the stained-glass window to cast startling shades of blue, red and green all along the cross, and Will nearly gulped taking in the rivulets of red dripping all along the body pinned to it.  Seemed the Blakes attended a church intent on realism.</p><p>Will found himself considering the exact shade of Jesus’ painted blood spilling out his side and compared it to what he remembered dripping excessively from Tom’s torso not even two weeks prior.  He’d been unresponsive, head lolling to the side as tremors seized his body.</p><p>Will remembered standing over his makeshift triage table, hands fluttering uselessly up and down his arm, unsure where to touch, how to help.  His eyes flashed open unseeingly, locking with a maddening cloudiness on Will’s face before a strangled gasp ripped from his gaping mouth and he collapsed unmoving on the table, blood saturating every white bandage pressed hastily to his side.</p><p>The worn red carpet of the aisle looked an awful lot like the shade of Gryffindor red sewn into the overhanging banners, and Will realized he was caught somewhere between Essex and Hogwarts as he finally made his way to the front of the line.</p><p>“Sorry for your loss,” he said stiltedly to an unfamiliar couple of twenty-somethings.  Maybe these were the cousins Tom told stories about?</p><p>They smiled thinly back, apparently used to accepting platitudes from complete strangers.  Joe’d had a lot of friends—muggle and magical—obviously, so his funeral filled up the whole church.  Blakes were just friendly like that.  For one horrible moment, Will began constructing a likely mourner list for Tom’s funeral and had barely scraped twenty candidates when he looked up to find Tom (very much alive) leaning heavily against his mother beside a polished casket.</p><p>He looked so distinctly uncomfortable, hands fidgeting as he scratched at his neck and felt the fabric of his trouser pocket and drummed on the wood of an unfamiliar cane and look literally everywhere except the casket all at once.  Will was practically crawling out of his skin.</p><p>Tom looked like he was in danger, and Will wanted nothing more than to put him somewhere safe.  Give him a task that would limit his involvement in this horror.  Somewhere safe, somewhere he knew.  Like the Forbidden Forest, but that hadn’t worked out, had it?  He’d been stupid to think anywhere was safe.  Stupid to think he could do anything to stop death.</p><p>His jaw ached as he thought of those agonized dying screams Joe had let out, cornered by Death Eaters and praying for help.</p><p>His body was still laid out on the dungeon floor, not ten meters from that Death Eater he’d quietly strangled in Headmaster Snape’s old study.</p><p>Joe had prayed.  Will had killed with his bare hands.</p><p>Strange how quickly two wizards would act as muggles when facing death.  How fitting that he’d be laid to rest in a church graveyard.</p><p>“Scho?”</p><p>Will’s mind went carefully blank as he shuffled forward the last two steps to Tom.  Tom looked much how you’d expect a recent stab wound victim would look, had he not been healed magically days earlier.  He kept his arms uncharacteristically folded into his torso, and his brown hair—which had been perpetually gelled back since his Third Year—laid flatly across his forehead.  His skin had taken on a ghastly pallor that leeched color even from his chapped lips, and a deep scowl creased his baby face unrecognizably.</p><p>He was alive.</p><p>Despite himself, a wan smile crept onto Will’s face as he reached out to pull Tom’s weight off his mother and onto him.  Tom let out a surprised grunt, and Will nearly choked as his tie tightened around his neck.  He allowed himself a moment longer to hold Tom, arms patting down his sides to check for more injuries, when he finally leaned back, an all too familiar burning sensation in his eyes.</p><p>“Alright, Tom?” he gritted out.</p><p>“M’fine,” Tom muttered back, reddened eyes disoriented.  “Thanks for coming.”</p><p>“Course.”</p><p>A pause.</p><p>“Hello, Will.”</p><p>“’Lo, Mrs. Blake,” he practically whispered as she pulled him into a hug of her own.</p><p>Will screwed his eyes tightly shut as his head fitted over her shoulder.  He’d give anything not to see Joe Blake unmoving in his open casket.</p><p>The funeral passed without much fanfare, half-truths of heroism and sacrifice occasionally punching the air as Will distantly remembered this was a muggle-friendly affair.</p><p>They kept saying he died a hero, but all Will could remember was that he died afraid.</p><p>Will shuffled into the church basement and watched vacantly as a couple of kids swiped at the empty coat hangers before dodging around the corner, giggling all the way in their black dresses.  The basement was drenched in fluorescent lights and bleached yellow watermarks stained the ceiling, but Will couldn’t help but remember he was underground.  There were many people in black, some in veils, and everyone of them could be trying to kill him.</p><p>He screwed his eyes shut and quietly excused himself from the buffet line to lean firmly against a solid wall of cinderblock and chipping paint.  Distractedly, he started a headcount of attendants, tapping his hand against his thigh for every three mourners.</p><p>The damp of the Potions classroom slowly gave way to the smell of overcooked macaroni, and Will quietly congratulated himself for avoiding making a scene.  He moved to push off the wall and rejoin the buffet when Tom suddenly leant next to him, pressing his arm to his in greeting.</p><p>He looked impossibly more wrung out than he did in the receiving line.  Those dark bruises under his eyes had flourished to an even deeper purple, and Will jolted as he felt a tremor overtake Tom’s arm.  He leant more heavily into Tom’s weight.</p><p>“M’not all that hungry,” Will grumbled.  Tom blinked as if he just realized Will was next to him.  “Think I’ll go outside if you want to come.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Tom whispered.  “Might as well.”</p><p>They moved from the wall and headed for the carpeted stairs.  Will followed as Tom slowly picked his way across the parking lot to a graveled path.  Their footsteps crackled, and Will watched as Tom kicked up a puff of red powder with every step.  That crisp black pantleg soon became chalky with residue, and Will distantly thought he might stoop down to pat the dust from his legs.</p><p>The path wound into the woods, and as they turned the corner, a white statue of Mary nestled into a bricked grotto appeared at the end.</p><p>“Took a lot of pictures here for our First Communions,” Tom muttered.  Will hummed noncommittally.  “Think it might have been May Crowning?  Always thought it was pretty.”</p><p>“It’s nice,” Will agreed.</p><p>Tom was staring unseeingly at a space in the wall, lost in some bittersweet memory.</p><p>Will stuffed his hands in his wand pocket and looked around the unfamiliar grotto.  Red gravel littered the path and spilled messily into the surrounding flowerbeds.  Miniature riverbeds carved their way through the path, exposing the dried dirt beneath it.  Green and purple weeds sprung flatly and haphazardly at the edges, and a slight breeze set the whole grotto in motion as Mother Mary looked serenely upward.</p><p>Will followed Mary’s gaze up to the stubbornly overcast sky and stepped off the path.  He picked his way through a scraggly patch of grass and sat heavily against a tree trunk at the edge of the grotto.</p><p>Tom was still standing on the path, red chalk clinging to his pants.  That tremor Will had felt through his arm was easy to see in the slope of his shoulders, hunched inwards and completely wrong.</p><p>Will cleared his throat, and Tom’s concentration broke from the wall.  A ghost of a smile darted across his face as he found Will sprawled against the tree trunk.</p><p>“There’s a bench.”</p><p>“Yeah, figured.”</p><p>Tom picked his way through the grass to Will’s side.</p><p>“Guess we’ll just sit here, then.”</p><p>“Guess so.”</p><p>May soon gave way to June, and Will could hardly believe that the world could continue as normal.  As if there was nothing to be afraid of and an endless number of futures laid out before them.  As if it were unconceivable for children to be locked into combat, flinching at even their own shadows.</p><p>Margaret spent most of her time busying herself around the house.  Scho could hardly walk into a room and not find her manically dusting or tidying.  Dad started gently inquiring after her administrative job at dinnertime, and she’d rise with a faraway look in her eyes to collect the dirty dishes as Mum fussed with her at the sink.</p><p>Sharon handled it as if nothing happened at all.  Owls darted into the kitchen at all hours, and Sharon would neatly collect parchments from their leg and disappear back into her room.  (With a sinking feeling in his gut, he really hoped she wasn’t writing Tom again.)  She played at normalcy, laughing in all the right places and dashing out the house to meet her muggle friends every weekend.  She complained about her job as a server at the pub, and she seemed genuinely occupied with nagging at Will any chance she had.</p><p>It would have been convincing if the walls between their rooms weren’t so thin.  Will quickly learned to act as if he didn’t hear her agonized screams at four in the morning, burying his head into his pillow as he’d listen to Mum or Margaret or Dad or all three rush into her room, murmuring that that was nothing left to be afraid of.</p><p>Will couldn’t find it in himself to lie like that.</p><p>Since coming home from the battle, the slightest shift in his peripherals meant danger.  A rustling branch morphed into the sure hand of a Death Eater.  An ill-advised dragon tattoo curling around a man’s calf at the grocery set off eerie echoes of sleeping dragons and blind school pride.</p><p>His hands had a permanent tremor, but at least he was alive.</p><p>Will was going mental with paranoia.  Even Dad lumbering from the living room to the bathroom was enough to set him off.  He could put on a good enough front when Sharon was taking the mickey out of him, but it wasn’t hard for his family to notice he never left his back exposed for long.  Corners of the room became his new haven.</p><p>Will was tiredly scooping unevenly reheated leftovers into his mouth one morning when Sharon yelled something unintelligible from upstairs.</p><p>Food half-chewed in his mouth, he called back, “Can’t hear you, idiot!”</p><p>Margaret’s head popped into the dining area.</p><p>“Could you shut up?  I can’t concentrate with you screaming from the table.”</p><p>“Well, tell Sharon that!”</p><p>“Sharon!” Margaret bellowed.  “We can’t hear you!  Come downstairs and <em>stop yelling</em>.”</p><p>“Merlin,” Will ground out as he went to rub at his ears.  “Why d’you get so mad about us yelling when you go and pull shit like that?”</p><p>Margaret threw her hands up as she disappeared back into the kitchen, and the volume from the telly suddenly filled the dining room with overdramatic music from whatever soap Margaret was watching.  Sharon’s stomping footsteps joined the cacophony as she came down the stairs, pen and parchment in hand.</p><p>Will’s hand tightened on his fork as he looked nervously out the window.</p><p>Had that been a robin or a ghoul hurtling into the brush?</p><p>“I’m writing Tom,” Sharon said exasperatedly as she collapsed into her seat at the table.  “Do you want to add a note?”</p><p>“Why’re you writing him?” he asked suspiciously, a prickly feeling suddenly pushing at his stomach.</p><p>“Well, maybe I just want to check up on my friend,” she said haughtily, chin tilted upward.  Her cheeks took on a telling pink.</p><p>Will scowled.</p><p>“Why would I want to tack on a P.S. to your love letter?”</p><p>Nearly dropping her pen, Sharon squeaked, “It’s <em>not</em> a love letter!  We’re just friends!  Plus,” she added on hurriedly, seeing Will’s disbelief, “he’s gay!  Everyone knows that.”</p><p>Will choked.</p><p>“I mean,” she stammered on.  “He’s never said as much, but me and Alice think so.  And we heard from Taylor that she saw Tom and some muggle boy on a date last summer at an ice cream parlor, holding hands and smiling and all that.  And that explained a lot, actually!  Because I did ask him out, but he turned me down, so I’m apparently definitely not his type.  And—Will?  Will, are you alright?”</p><p>“Erm,” he said in a strangled voice.  “I think I’m going for a walk.  I’ll write Tom later, I guess.”</p><p>“Well, don’t be weird about it!” she called after him.  “We don’t know for sure!  It’s just a theory!  Please, don’t tell him I said anything.”</p><p>With a haphazard thumbs up, Will ripped the front door open to take a long walk around the neighborhood.</p><p>His mind was reeling.</p><p>Tom Blake, the boy he’d looked forward to seeing every day since his Third Year, the boy who had taught him a language that was definitely not French, the boy who’d stolen his breath and disappeared into the Forbidden Forest without glancing backward, the boy he’d snuck glances at over his shoulder as he pulled Lisa Turpin closer at the Ravenclaw table, the boy that could not shut up whether drunk or sober, the boy whose dried blood had welded Will’s hand to his wand in the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, the boy who’d told story after story after story of his dead brother and let him share in his grief as Mary had looked on, might be gay.  <em>Might</em>.</p><p>Having reached the end of the front yard in ten paces, Will turned back around and tore back inside, nearly running into Sharon as she stepped up onto the stairs.</p><p>“What kind of walk was that?” she screeched.</p><p>Margaret’s head popped into the foyer.</p><p>“How many times,” she hissed, “do I have to tell you to be quiet?”</p><p>“Merlin, Margaret!  The house doesn’t revolve around you.  I can make as much noise as I like!”</p><p>“I swear to God, Sharon!” she screamed, hands gesticulating wildly in front of her.  “It’s not that hard.  Just stop talking—"</p><p>“I’m only being loud because—”</p><p>“So you <em>admit</em> you’re being loud!”</p><p>Sharon let out a frustrated scream.  Will elected to dart into his room before he got a headache.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>once again, i'm posting late and i can't bring myself to read too closely for grammar.  there's going to be one last chapter.  i swear to god.  hmu if you'd prefer it in tom's or will's perspective</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Revelations</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Obviously, William Schofield, recent graduate of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was very interested in Tom.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thomas Blake, the talkative idiot, had yet to get a clue.</em>
</p><hr/><p>Summer had crawled by at an agonizing crawl with sleepless nights, overly bright days and altogether too few owls.  Sharon and Margaret’s shrill voices echoed gratingly between Will’s ears, and he had never been happier to slam Sharon’s train cabin door behind him so he could run headfirst into Tom.</p><p>Tom didn’t just look alive anymore; he looked present.  That ghastly pallor at the funeral had disappeared under a freckled tan undoubtedly earned from hours working his uncle’s landscaping business.  His hands stopped hovering over his abdomen, and they’d picked up a new habit of fidgeting with a few gold rings.  His posture had straightened back to that cocky swagger he’d been trying out all Sixth Year, and those familiar laugh lines smoothed out any creases left behind by grief.</p><p>In this moment, reaching up to lightly punch Will’s arm in greeting with an unchecked grin, the world narrowed to Tom’s loose laughter and sly flash of cigarettes tucked into his breast pocket.</p><p>The compartment door swung back open with a thump as Sharon and their friends screeched their greetings, and Will scowled as Tom darted in the girls’ compartment.</p><p>Will leant against the compartment door, listening to the exchange of excited chatter until the train lurched to a start and he said a quick goodbye.</p><p>“I got us a compartment three doors down,” Will said as they stumbled down the hallway.  The train was picking up speed.</p><p>“Right, but we’ll have to stop at the prefect compartment first,” Tom huffed as his shoe caught on the back of Will’s.</p><p>Will shrugged over his shoulder, reaching nonchalantly for the compartment door.</p><p>“Actually, not a prefect this year.”</p><p>Tom sputtered, “Not a prefect?”</p><p>Will risked a glance back at Tom as he dropped onto the compartment booth.  His stomach sank as he saw Tom’s face fall.</p><p>“No,” he started.  “I figured I did it long enough.  Sick of pinning that badge every morning, y’know?”</p><p>Tom stayed quiet, seeming to understand what Will was really saying.</p><p>
  <em>I don’t want to patrol, not even if it’s with you.</em>
</p><p>“Yeah, you’re right.  It’s a pain.”</p><p>This wasn’t how this train ride was supposed to go.  Tom shouldn’t be glaring out the window and standing defensively at the compartment door.  Will scrambled to reach into his pockets.</p><p>“Uh, Scho?”</p><p>“Hm?”</p><p>“Your wand’s already on the booth,” Tom said.</p><p>“Well, yeah,” Will said distractedly, hands still patting down his pockets.  “I know that, but I’m looking for—Ha!”</p><p>Will presented the contents of his pocket with a shy smile.  Tom’s disconcerted face melted into an amused laugh.</p><p>“You got me a can of Ribena?” he giggled and reached out to grab at the outstretched can.  Will held his breath as his fingers brushed against the cool metal of his index finger’s ring.</p><p>A crisp pop bounced along the walls of the cabin as Tom pulled back the tab and took a swig.  He sat back on his booth and fished out the pack of cigarettes tucked into his robes.</p><p>With an unceremonious toss, Will caught the pack and looked up to find Tom smiling goofily over the rim of the can as he took another sip.</p><p>“You’re spoiling me, Scho.”</p><p>Will examined the beaten-up box in his hands.</p><p>“Well, how else am I supposed to repay you for these… um…”  Will looked up as Tom snorted another laugh and felt his lips shake as he tried to hold back his own laugh.  “These mint menthols?  Merlin, you’ve got to stop filching these from your mum’s purse.”</p><p>“They were the best I could manage!”</p><p>They smiled at each other goofily and settled into the rhythm of the train car, Tom occasionally punctuating the silence with a loud gulp of soda.</p><p>Tom cleared his throat.</p><p>“So,” he burped, crushing the empty can in his hand and tossing up into the air.  Will followed its arc with his wand and sputtered a quick incantation that disappeared it from the compartment with a pop.  “Who’s your Ribena plug?”</p><p>Will answered quickly, “Just filched it off one of Sharon’s muggle friends last week.  Threw it upstairs with my school stuff and forgot about it ‘til this morning.”</p><p>That couldn’t have been further from the truth.  Will had woken up from one of his nightmares in June and got it into his head that Tom couldn’t look like a warmed-over corpse while drinking Ribena.</p><p>He couldn’t bring back his brother, but he could at least give him something to smile at.</p><p>He’d grabbed ten galleons out his desk drawer and darted past Margaret and Sharon sprawled lazily on the living room couch without much notice.  The rest of the day had been devoted to trading galleons for whatever muggle currency was available at the exchange and apparating a block away from some monstrous Tesco about twenty miles from home.</p><p>He’d wandered the aisles, grumbling at being unable to summon the damn can to him and pulling self-consciously at his usual clothes as muggles wandered around in denim and cotton t-shirts, when he’d stumbled across an excessively large selection of soft drinks.</p><p>Another excruciating ten minutes passed by, and he’d finally grabbed his single can of Ribena and made his way to the till from hell.  He handed over a couple notes to an unsmiling cashier and headed home with what he was suspecting was way too much muggle money and an unassuming can of soda.</p><p>Falling asleep that night, his face reddened as he caught sight of it resting innocently on his desktop.  He buried a smile in his pillow and fell into the first dreamless sleep of the summer.</p><p>He almost missed that disappeared can of Ribena.  It’d chased away an absurd number of nightmares.</p><p>Tom smiled conspiratorially across the compartment, arm splayed out to stretch the length of the booth and tie askew.</p><p>“So, I bet you want to hear how I nabbed those fags from Mum.”</p><p>Will leant back, copying Tom’s posture as he fell into the rhythm of the train and the cadence of Tom’s voice.</p><p>An hour later, as Tom laughingly stumbled out the compartment after a couple Sixth Year Slytherin prefects, Will found that familiar creak in his elbows as his back hunched, and he pressed himself into the corner of the empty compartment.</p><p>The first week of classes started with Tom dragging Will to the Gryffindor table every day for lunch.</p><p>(The first time, Will balked as his gaze caught the spot where Tom had been laid out, unconscious and sluggishly bleeding, where plates and silverware were now neatly arranged for students.  Tom placed his hand firmly at the back of Will’s trembling shoulders and pushed him to the other end of the table.)</p><p>They’d settled back into their comfortable routine of Tom talking, excessively, and Will nodding, distractedly.  A rotating cast of Gryffindors would sit opposite the boys, but it was becoming more and more apparent that Andy Miller was intending to reserve himself a permanent seat.</p><p>On account of Will.</p><p>Sure, Will had been flirted with before, but never so openly by a boy.</p><p>Miller constantly found ways to touch Will, from asking Will to pass the salt to pressing his ankle to Will’s under the table.  Will flushed darkly at every point of contact, and judging by the increasingly constipated expression on Tom’s face, he wasn’t doing a good job hiding it.</p><p>Miller would follow-up Tom’s stories with a well-timed joke, and he’d look to Will for approval, face open and eyes smiling.  Anytime there was a lull in conversation, he’d turn to face Will directly and ask about his day and <em>mean it</em>.</p><p>It was becoming clear that Miller would prefer sitting in Tom’s place.  On Wednesday, Will had stopped short as he found Tom and Miller sitting opposite each other, Tom glaring daggers at Miller as he sat on Miller’s usual bench.  Will sat with a heavy thud next to Tom, and Miller’s eyebrow twitched uncontrollably for a few minutes as he ladled soup into his bowl.</p><p>Conversation resumed normally, but Will became thoroughly distracted as Tom fiddled with his rings and stacked and restacked them on the table, leg pressed firmly to Will’s thigh.</p><p>Later that night, Will wiped at his mouth with a towel as he turned off the faucet.  The usual commotion of Ravenclaw Tower filtered up the staircase as he set his toothbrush back on its designated shelf.  He turned to open the door when a muffled voice asked hurriedly, “Anyone seen Schofield?”</p><p>Will paused, eyebrows scrunching together as he tried to think of why anyone would be looking for him.  Maybe the disembodied voice was looking for Sharon?</p><p>He pulled the door open and stepped out onto the staircase, where a frenzied Fourth Year was gesturing frantically at the Sixth-Year dormitory.  He turned at the sound of the creaking door, and that frenzied expression intensified with recognition, a prefect badge glinting dully on his chest.</p><p>“Schofield!  Blake’s outside.  <em>Shite</em> patrol!” he yelled after Will, but he hardly heard him, tearing down the stairs and elbowing a couple Second Years out of his way.</p><p>Will’s breath was knocked out his lungs when he sprinted out the Common Room.  Tom was pacing frantically outside the tower, eyes wild and wand held shakily in his wand hand.  He whirled at Will, hardly recognizing him as he jerked back into the corridor wall.</p><p>A beat passed, and Will held up his hands nonthreateningly.  Tom’s ragged gasps for air stopped with a chilling silence, and Will slowly stepped forward as Tom dropped his wand arm.</p><p>“Tom?” he asked quietly.</p><p>“<em>Fuck</em>,” Tom huffed out.  His eyes screwed shut as Will made those last few steps to stand in front of Tom.  “Fuck!”</p><p>He braced himself and forced a building tremor from his lungs.</p><p>“What happened?”</p><p>Tom made a strangled noise and opened his eyes to look pleadingly at Will.</p><p>They both knew what happened.</p><p>Will reached out for Tom’s shoulder and pulled him from the wall.  Tom practically fell into his chest, forehead clammy and tremors shaking his whole body.  Will’s hand came up to thread his fingers through the short hairs at the nape of Tom’s neck, and he breathed out heavily, a few stubborn tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.</p><p>While one of Tom’s hands was still tightly gripping his wand, the other came up to grip at Will’s sleep shirt.  Will took an unsteady breath and gently patted his hand against Tom’s neck before moving to step out of his space.</p><p>Tom made a quiet, heartbreaking sound and stepped with Will, hand still securely grabbing at the fabric over his heart.</p><p>Will huffed and adjusted his hold on Tom’s neck.  Eyes darting the length of the corridor, he shuffled so that his back was to the wall and let Tom sag against his front.</p><p>Eventually, Tom’s fist spasmed open and his forehead pressed uncomfortably into Will’s sternum.  With an open palm, Tom pushed himself from the loose circle of Will’s arms and blinked blearily.</p><p>Will opened his mouth to offer to walk Blake back to Gryffindor.</p><p>“Can I just stay here, tonight?” Tom asked softly, shoulders hunched forward as if he were in danger of falling back into Will.  His eyes were red-rimmed and fixed to the floor.</p><p>Will paused.</p><p>And reached his hand out to circle loosely around Tom’s wrist.  He nodded faintly and pulled him across the corridor into Ravenclaw Tower.</p><p>The Common Room was abandoned, even the late-night studiers had straggled upstairs.  Will picked carefully through the haphazard scattering of desks and armchairs as Tom’s muffled footsteps echoed behind him.</p><p>They walked quietly up the staircase, winding past every dormitory until they reached the Eighth-Year door.  Will chanced a glance back at his shadow to find Tom swaying half-asleep, eyes fluttering as he leaned into the solid doorway.</p><p>Will felt a fond smile tug at his lips as he tugged at Tom’s limp wrist until they landed on Will’s unmade bed.</p><p>Will shifted to pull at the curtains until hardly any light filtered in.  He patted blindly at his nightstand until he found the familiar weight of his wand.  Tom shuffled at his back, reaching down to slide off his shoes and drop them to the floor.</p><p>Will rolled his eyes affectionately as Tom flopped onto the mattress with a contented sigh, and he lifted his wand to point at the dark ceiling overhead.</p><p>With a muffled incantation, a softly glowing blanket of stars appeared.  Will turned to take in Tom’s sleepy smile before setting his wand back on his nightstand.  Lying back, he tentatively reached down to find Tom’s wand hand.</p><p>Gently, he slid the wand from the tips of Tom’s fingers and slid it under their shared pillow.</p><p>None of Will’s dormmates commented the next morning when Tom Blake rolled out Will Schofield’s bed, uniform rumpled and arms outstretched.</p><p>They didn’t comment the next Wednesday or the Wednesday after that, and Will cleared a space under his bed for Tom’s overnight bag.</p><p>Despite all that, the schoolyear slogged on, and Andy Miller kept up with his determined flirting.</p><p>Will’s sure that it annoyed Tom by this point.  That tic in his jaw only ever made an appearance when Miller was in sight.  Will just couldn’t figure out whether it’s because Tom’s jealous that Will’s attention was preoccupied or he was just plain <em>jealous</em>.</p><p>Tom never dated much at Hogwarts.  Will remembered a sick-inducing couple months where Tom would crane his neck to catch a glimpse of Sharon walking toward the Gryffindor table and laugh loudly and easily at anything she said, but he hadn’t shown much interest in anyone after that.</p><p>Then again, Will hardly saw Tom over the summers.  Joe used to laughingly recount a hideous green shirt Tom had tried to wear out on a date sometime in Fourth Year, and Tom turned a startling shade of red before punching Joe warningly in the shoulder.  So Will supposed he wasn’t completely disinterested in <em>people</em>.</p><p>Will couldn’t narrow it down from there.</p><p>He started watching carefully when Tom would interact with other students.  Was he smiling extra brightly at Parry?  Was he especially touchy with Kilgour?  Were those study sessions with Brown <em>really</em> just study sessions?</p><p>Will thought about it embarrassingly often.</p><p>One afternoon, Will trudged into the Great Hall and made his way to Gryffindor’s table to stop abruptly.</p><p>His usual spot was occupied by Sharon, sitting smilingly next to Tom as their knees knocked together and their hands gestured between them.  Sharon made a sweeping move with her arm, and Tom fell back, shoulders shaking as his hands hit weakly at the tabletop.  Sharon motioned as if she was about to say another devastatingly hilarious one-liner when she caught Will’s stupefied expression.</p><p>She straightened up and tilted her head with a smile, inviting him to sit across the table.</p><p>He sulked to the unfamiliar bench and Tom laughed a greeting, finally catching his breath.</p><p> “Will!” he said.  “Will, you’ve got to hear what Sharon did in Trelawney’s class.  I think I’m dying.”</p><p>“Dying?” Miller said as he slipped onto the bench next to Will.  “Let’s not do that.”</p><p>Sharon huffed out a laugh as Tom’s smile distilled into a polite nod.</p><p>Will shifted nervously.  Sharon hardly ever left Ravenclaw Table for lunch, and she was sitting uncomfortably close to Tom.</p><p>Had they started flirting, again?</p><p>Lunch passed in a strange fugue.  Tom and Sharon were wrapped up in recounting stories from their shared Herbology course.  Will listened intently, trying to find a spot to insert himself into the conversation and turn Tom’s attention back to <em>him</em> while Miller pressed into Will’s side.</p><p>Miller touched at Will’s wrist to get his attention, and Will smiled faintly as Miller asked after Bludger.  Miller had a cat, too, but he brought him to Hogwarts.  He was offering to bring his pet to the grounds that weekend when a movement out the corner of his eye snagged Will’s attention.</p><p>Will coughed as he choked on his chips.</p><p>Sharon had kissed Tom on the cheek.</p><p>Tom sputtered as he smiled up at Sharon, who made a move to stand up and collect her bookbag.</p><p>“Sorry!” she said cheerily.  “I just remembered I left my Astronomy textbook back in the dorms.  I’ll see you later, Tom?”</p><p>Tom nodded, cheeks a burning pink, but Will could hardly tear his eyes away from Sharon’s glare.  She turned smartly and walked away.</p><p>Miller cleared his throat.</p><p>“It’s always so weird to see how much your sister looks like you, Will.  Like if you grew your hair out, and you got—"</p><p>“You’ve got a thing going with Sharon?”</p><p>“What?” Tom asked dazedly, turning his attention back to Will.  “No!  No, we’re just friends.”</p><p>“Good,” Will ground out as he stabbed his fork into plate.</p><p>As the Common Room cleared out that night, Will snagged Sharon’s elbow before she could dart up the girls’ staircase.</p><p>“What was that?”</p><p>“What was what?” she asked innocently.</p><p>“The—the.  You know!  The thing!”  Sharon looked comically confused, and Will swung his pointer finger wildly.  “On the cheek!”</p><p>“Oh, that,” she said airily.  “Figured I’d have another go at Tom.  He is pretty fit, don’t you think?”</p><p>“But—” Will spluttered.  “I thought you said he might—”</p><p>“Speculation!” Sharon interjected.  She leaned in conspiratorially.  “It’s not like you’ve done anything to find out.”</p><p>Will ran a hand across his face.</p><p>“Share, what the hell.”</p><p>“Listen,” she said, and her face turned serious.  “I’ve seen how he acts when Miller sits with you two, and I was sick of him looking like a kicked puppy all through lunch.  Stop jerking him around.  Okay?”</p><p>Will looked past her and up the empty girls’ staircase.</p><p>“I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.”</p><p>Sharon scoffed.</p><p>Later that week, Will met Miller out on the grounds with his cat, and let it slip that he had a massive crush on Tom Blake.</p><p>Spring had just started melting the most stubborn snowbanks when another Hogsmeade visit came around the bend.</p><p>The final warning was sounded for students to make their way back to Hogwarts, and Will and Tom came stumbling out the Three Broomsticks flushed, giggling and completely nonsensical.</p><p>Tom yelled a loud goodbye over his shoulder, and Will nearly fell to the ground as Tom swung back around to loop an arm over his shoulder.</p><p>The last dregs of sunlight passed in a blur of stumbling students and stern, resigned glares from professors.  Will stumbled into the Ravenclaw Common Room and distantly noted that Tom was still attached to his back.</p><p>He smiled goofily, and Tom caught his grin.  Will shook his head exaggeratedly as Tom held out a half-empty bottle of firewhiskey he’d snuck into the castle under his robes.</p><p>“Suit yourself,” Tom laughed, and Will was entranced watching him tilt his head back and take a pull directly from the bottle.</p><p>Tom tucked the bottle back into his robes, smiling mischievously up the boys’ staircase as he pulled at Will’s arm clumsily.</p><p>“Upward and onward!” he slurred and turned that smile in all its intensity on Will, who was much too drunk to stop himself from smiling back.</p><p>They had stumbled up the stairs and into the darkened Ravenclaw dormitory before Will found some semblance of sobriety.</p><p>“But—” Will floundered, “But it’s not Wednesday!”</p><p>“<em>Fuck</em> Wednesdays!”</p><p>Will hiccupped a laugh.  Tom smilingly poked his head out the curtains, and a pillow came flying out of Will’s peripheral as Boot grumbled about quiet hours.  Will pushed his palm firmly against Tom’s forehead until he flopped out of sight with a thump on the mattress.</p><p>With a fond sigh, Will crouched to fish the overnight bag from under his bed and threw it between the gap in the curtains.</p><p>A thump and a wheeze.</p><p>“Will!” Tom stage whispered.  “Will, I’ve been attacked.  By my bag.  My bag has attacked me.  I have been atta—”</p><p>“Fuck off!” Will laughed as he batted at the curtains.  “You’re not sleeping in here again without pajamas.”</p><p>“No.  No!” Tom huffed, and a sock came whipping out the bed.  A giggle and another sock fell to the floor.  “No, you fuck off!”</p><p>Will found himself nearly in hysterics, clutching at the wall to support his weight as he laughed maniacally.  Boot ducked out his bed to point his wand threateningly at Will’s corner.  Will laughed harder, and a pair of boxers suddenly landed at his feet.</p><p>Will stopped laughing.</p><p>“<em>Thank</em> you,” Boot grumbled and climbed back into bed.</p><p>Will’s eyes were trained on Tom’s discarded boxers and all the implications of those <em>discarded boxers</em> rushed through his head.  Tom was <em>on his bed</em>, and <em>his boxers</em> were on the floor.  Tom’s <em>boxers</em> were on the floor, and Will was leant up against the wall like an idiot, tongue caught in the back of his throat and eyes unblinkingly wide.</p><p>“Fuck you,” Tom sang.  “I’ve got pajamas.”</p><p>The curtains swung open with a flourish, and Tom braced his arm on the bedpost to lean forward and flip Will off.  Will blinked, and he nearly choked again to find Tom in his usual sleepshirt and shorts.</p><p>Tom’s hair was mussed, and his shirt’s neckline was slightly askew.  His arms reached overhead as he gripped at the curtain rod, hands flexing as he adjusted his drunken weight.  His sea blue eyes were sleepily hooded and lingering dangerously on Will’s face as he schooled his expression into some semblance of normal, but that firewhiskey earlier certainly didn’t help things as his concentration fastened on Tom’s too-pink lips.</p><p>“Right,” Will swallowed.  “Go brush your teeth, too.”</p><p>“Sure,” Tom whispered, leaning impossibly closer into Will’s space.</p><p>Will’s hands twitched at his sides as he thought about how easy it would be just to reach up and fix Tom’s shirt, to put it back into place, but even while he was drunk, he knew better.  So he reached up, hand ghosting over Tom’s shoulder as Tom inhaled quickly, gripped the back of Tom’s neck and tugged.</p><p>Tom came tumbling off Will’s bed in a graceless heap, and Will vaulted himself onto his vacated mattress.</p><p>“The fuck, Schofield!” Boot yelled out, and Will stared at Tom laying dazedly on his back, laughing hysterically as he scrambled back to his feet, toothbrush and toothpaste proudly in hand.</p><p>Waking up with hazy memories of sleep clothes and tempting smiles, Will suddenly got it in his head that he might have a chance.</p><p>He turned over with a pained groan to find Tom taking up much more than his fair share of the bed, and he fell back into the crook of his arm.  There was plenty of time to think about that.</p><p>As it turned out, Will wouldn’t spend much time thinking beyond N.E.W.T.S. and applying for apprenticeships.  He hardly blinked, and he was suddenly graduated and packing Sharon’s trunk on the Hogwarts Express for the last time.</p><p>Tom found him in her train compartment and dragged him out to a compartment he’d saved for the two of them with a cigarette tucked behind his ear.</p><p>The train lurched to a start, and Will jolted.</p><p>He sat up as if he was about to start talking, and Tom leaned forward expectantly, blue eyes wide and attentive.</p><p>All this time to think, and he never thought of a proper opening.</p><p>Sitting rigidly in his booth, Will started, “So, what’cha think of birds?”</p><p>Tom glanced confusedly out the window, looking at the rushing treeline just beyond the tracks.</p><p>“Well,” he said slowly, “they fly pretty well.”  Will stared back, gobsmacked.  Tom took it as an invitation to continue.  “But just some advice: never go near a swan.  We’ve had this pair that keeps showing up on our pond, and those things are vicious.  Tried swimming last summer with Myrtle and—and nearly got drowned.  Can you imagine dying with all those white feathers in your hair?  Embarrassing—”</p><p>“Not <em>birds</em>, you moron,” Will laughed.  “<em>Birds</em>.”</p><p>“<em>Birds</em>?”</p><p>“Birds.”</p><p>“They’re alright, I guess,” Tom said.  He paused and looked at Will sideways.  “Prefer looking at blokes, though.”</p><p>Will exhaled loudly.</p><p>“Yeah, I prefer looking at you.”</p><p>Tom whipped his gaze from the window back to Will, face turning a deep scarlet, and Will had the creeping suspicion his face was equally red.  He tucked his shaking hands under his legs.</p><p>Tom kept looking at him with this shocked expression, and a horrible feeling started gathering in Will’s gut.</p><p>Tom may have liked looking at blokes, but that didn’t necessarily mean he liked looking at <em>Will</em>.</p><p>Will turned his head to look out the train compartment for the sweets trolley.  Maybe Miller with his murderous cat?  Hell, at this point, he’d even take Sharon bursting in to announce Voldemort’s return.</p><p>“So—so, I guess.  You don’t like birds?”</p><p>Will’s head snapped to the left.</p><p>“Are you daft?  What the <em>fuck</em> have I been saying to you, Blake?”</p><p>“I mean, yes, you fancy me.”  Tom’s eyes lifted dazedly, seemingly unable to focus on any one point of Will’s face.  (Will had no such issue.  His eyes were pinned to Blake’s gaping mouth, calculating how long it would take this idiot to get his shit together.)  “But are you saying you fancy me in a friendship kind of way?  You seemed to really like tits last time I checked,” his voice tapered off hysterically.</p><p>This boy was moronic.</p><p>Will’s hand bunched in Tom’s wrinkled shirt and <em>pulled</em> until their noses brushed.  Letting out an exasperated breath, Will bridged the gap, settling his mouth chastely against Tom’s.</p><p>Tom made a surprised sound, hands flailing to find purchase on Will’s forearm and shoulder.  He pulled back abruptly with wide eyes, and Will couldn’t help but eye the wildly fluttering pulse in Tom’s neck.</p><p>A moment passed, and Tom’s hand suddenly came up to grab at Will’s robes.  He shifted over in his booth and dragged Will across the compartment so he practically fell into Tom’s lap.</p><p>Will started as the cool of Tom’s rings pressed against his overheated skin, and Tom huffed out a laugh as he pushed up to capture Will’s open mouth with his own.  Bracing his hand against the wall, Will returned the kiss until he could hardly breathe.</p><p>With considerable effort, he leant back and broke the kiss.  He couldn’t help smiling as Tom—eyes still closed and lips still pursed—blindly surged up to find Will’s lips.  Will ducked Tom’s advance and settled his smile at the juncture of Tom’s jaw and neck.</p><p>Satisfactorily, he felt Tom shudder.</p><p>“To be clear,” Will started softly, lips ghostly over Tom’s ear, “I only kissed you as a friend.”</p><p>Hands gripped his shoulders tightly, wrenching Will and his ridiculous smile entirely too far from Tom’s person.</p><p>“Piss off,” Tom groaned and pressed his lips back to Will’s with a laugh.</p><p>The moron was finally catching on.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thanks for reading!  I started out this story with just a few scraps of dialogue, and I somehow blew it up to 20k words.  I really appreciated all your comments!  And if you have any suggestions or prompts, feel free to hmu.<br/>Stay healthy!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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